Court Opinion

ID: 9677465
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 05:53:06.906724+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:56.176433
License: Public Domain

SCHUDSON, J.
(concurring). Wandering through the maze of America's competitive insurance industry, parents often change health care coverage. Sometimes they do so because they become unemployed; sometimes because they change employment; sometimes because they or their employers locate more attractive or affordable insurance programs.
Sometimes, to their amazement, they later learn that their change caused their loss of crucial coverage. Sometimes, based on persuasive promotions from insurance companies and explanations from employers, they could neither anticipate nor reasonably expect that their children would lose coverage too.
Sometimes, as a result, children suffer. That children suffer is tragic at any time, under any circumstances. That children suffer due to loss of *708insurance, resulting from adult decisions beyond their control and beyond their parents' control, is tragic and unjust.
Today, this court provides careful legal analysis of one such unjust loss. I add only a few words to assure that, within the maze of legal analysis, we not lose sight of a child — one very little girl who, along with her family, would have suffered had we not found our way to this fundamentally humane and just application of law.
With special pleasure, therefore, I concur and emphasize the message of Justice Blackmun who, in another legal maze, also searched for the health and safety of a child:
[T]he question presented by this case is an open one, and our... precedents may be read more broadly or narrowly depending upon how one chooses to read them. Faced with the choice, I would adopt a "sympathetic" reading, one which comports with dictates of fundamental justice and recognizes that compassion need not be exiled from the province of judging.
DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dep't of Social Servs., 489 U.S. 189, 212-213 (1989) (Blackmun, J., dissenting).