This is Just Wrong…
The “War on Obesity” has definitely lost its bearings when a healthy, 4 month old, 100% breast fed infant can be labelled “obese” and denied health insurance.
By the numbers, Alex is in the 99th percentile for height and weight for babies his age. Insurers don’t take babies above the 95th percentile, no matter how healthy they are otherwise.
“I could understand if we could control what he’s eating. But he’s 4 months old. He’s breast-feeding. We can’t put him on the Atkins diet or on a treadmill,” joked his frustrated father, Bernie Lange, a part-time news anchor at KKCO-TV in Grand Junction. “There is just something absurd about denying an infant.”
Bernie and Kelli Lange tried to get insurance for their growing family with Rocky Mountain Health Plans when their current insurer raised their rates 40 percent after Alex was born. They filled out the paperwork and awaited approval, figuring their family is young and healthy. But the broker who was helping them find new insurance called Thursday with news that shocked them.
” ‘Your baby is too fat,’ she told me,” Bernie said.
…At birth, Alex weighed a normal 8 1/4 pounds. On a diet of strictly breast milk, his weight has more than doubled. He weighs about 17 pounds and is about 25 inches long.
…The Langes, both slender, don’t know where Alex’s propensity for pounds came from. Their other child is thin. No one in their families has a weight problem.
At this point, there’s no reason to suspect that the kid is anything but an outlier. He’s large for his age, but it’s reasonable to suspect that his growth will slow down… within a year from now, I’d be willing to bet that his size will be quite average. My own son, Ryan was like that: he was in the 90th percentile during his first few months of life, but his growth rate tapered off after 6 months. At 19, he’s 5′ 11″ (tall, but not as tall as his dad) and a real beanpole – so his early growth spurt wasn’t an indication of his adult size/girth. Same deal with my nephew, Sam, who was an absolute tank as an infant, but at 22, is quite lean and athletic.
Unreal…
