Carressa Jackson looked at the bill for $1 million.
It had come after her son Jerome Scott’s heart rate dropped, after doctors delivered him — weighing barely a pound — at 26 weeks, after a helicopter whisked the newborn from West Palm Beach to Nicklaus Children’s Hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit and after a series of tubes and an incubator were employed to keep him alive.
“I had no idea what to do,” she said. Her insurance footed most of the bill, but Jackson, a single mother of two whose middle-class income disqualified her from the hospital’s grant programs, would be paying the rest of it off for years…