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Then Drumm read in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the state of New Jersey had just passed a law requiring insurance companies to provide 48-hour stays for deliveries. Drumm contacted her local state senator and representative, but they weren't much help, she says. One staffer told Drumm that there was "no activity" on the matter in the state senate, and another told her that the state representative was just beginning to draft such a bill.

"At the bottom of the article," Drumm says, "it said that Sen. Bradley was working to make 48-hour stays the law on the federal level ... I was getting all these 'No's, so I decided to call Sen. Bradley. Getting it passed on the federal level is better than just the state, anyway."

Drumm's husband, Christopher, thought she was barking up the wrong tree. "You're not a New Jersey resident," he said, "you're not one of his constituents. He's going to laugh at you."

"How could this hurt?" she asked her husband.

Drumm was patched through to a Bradley health care aide and 24 hours later she and her husband were meeting with Bradley in the Hart Senate Office Building.

"I was very impressed," she says. "We weren't New Jersey residents, we weren't constituents, we couldn't vote for him, but there we were. And he genuinely cared about us, as people. He was wonderful. He gave us ideas about what to do. He told us to call local papers, make a lot of noise, and get our story out."

Drumm followed the senator's advice, and within a few weeks, the state representative's office that had earlier seemed so worthless had called Drumm back and invited her to testify at an upcoming hearing on the issue. On July 26, 1995, Drumm testified about her situation and her concern about her second pregnancy.

Lorina Marshall, a vice president of Independence Blue Cross, was at the hearing, and after Drumm testified, Marshall approached her. Drumm hadn't mentioned the name of her insurance company, and Marshall wanted to make sure it wasn't her employer. When Drumm told her that it indeed was, Marshall said, "Give me a copy of your testimony. You're going to hear from us."

On July 31, a representative of Independence Blue Cross contacted Drumm and told her she'd been pre-approved for a 48-hour stay. On Aug. 3, Independence Blue Cross held a press conference announcing that the company was changing its policy back to allowing 48-hour stays. "We had already been working on that," says Marshall. "It didn't pop up as a result of working with her. We'd pretty much already resolved what we were going to do."

Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Bradley continued fighting for his bill. In testimony presented to the Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources in support for his bill in September 1995, Bradley said that Drumm "had been told that if she had been forced to leave the hospital after 24 hours, as is now common, she probably would have died and her daughter would have been retarded."

One pediatrician labels that "hyperbole -- but potentially true."

Two days after Independence Blue Cross held its press conference, Drumm gave birth to Maura Elizabeth at Holy Redeemer Hospital in Meadowbrook, Penn. The delivery was less difficult, though the 48-hour stay was a relief since Maura Elizabeth, too, contracted jaundice and needed care.

A year later, Bradley's bill passed the Senate.

So where's the baby whose life Bradley saved? Drumm's third child, Caitlin Ann, was born at Abington Memorial Hospital, without complications after Bradley's bill had become law.

The idea that Bradley saved her life is, at best, a figurative sort of claim.

"I believe my third child is alive today because of Sen. Bradley," insists Drumm. "Because there wouldn't have even been a third pregnancy if I thought I'd have to fight with the insurance companies. If there wasn't the law saying that now the insurance companies have to give us this time in the hospital, I couldn't have done it."

But as admirable as Bradley's receptiveness to her plight was, and as important as his bill remains, wasn't the latest campaign ad misleading, because he actually didn't save any of her daughters' lives?

"Everybody can take this how they want," Drumm responds, "but that's how I look at it."
salon.com | Nov. 16, 1999

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