After a major insurance company denied coverage for a medical flight that could save her daughter’s life, Alexandria McMahon took the story to social media and caught the attention of billionaire Mark Cuban.
Stella McMahon was diagnosed with T-cell leukemia at just four months old. Now, a year later to the day, she’s been fighting relentless fevers above 104 degrees for nearly a month; her liver’s overtaxed, and her body’s too immunocompromised to ward off a virus on its own. The cruel irony of Stella’s condition: because she has T-cell leukemia, her doctors at Children’s Minnesota had successfully eradicated her T-cells, the very cells she needed to fight the virus now threatening her life.
The McMahon Family
Her oncologist, Dr. Lane Miller, identified a solution: a federally funded study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in which genetically modified T-cells, donated and engineered in a lab, are transfused into the patient. The procedure itself was covered. The medical flight to get Stella there was not.
Her mom, Alexandria, submitted a pre-authorization request through the family’s major insurance provider on a Sunday, March 15. For five days, she heard nothing. “I called them on a Friday just to try to understand what was happening, like why it was taking so long,” she told Fortune, while the sounds of little Stella were heard in the background. “And from that phone call, I learned that we had actually been denied.”
