INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Members of the Indiana General Assembly are hearing a unified call for help as they return to the statehouse Monday. The Sickle Cell Awareness Day event aims to fill the building with messages about the problems many people with sickle cell face to alert lawmakers to ways the state can help.
“We hope to secure more funding for sickle cell disease,” explained organizer Kisha Hampton during a visit to WISH-TV’s Daybreak in the hours before the event. “Specifically, (we want to) talk to the people at the statehouse in regards to expanding the Children’s Special Health Care Services program to past 21 so that people can have medical coverage.”
Hampton will represent Innovative Hematology, one of several different healthcare partners that have signed on for the event.
Hampton says more than 1,700 people in Indiana have sickle cell disease, in which red blood cells turn hard, sticky, and misshapen. “Our normal red blood cells are round, but when you have sickle cell disease, the blood cells take on a sickle or crescent moon shape. These blood cells die fast and they don’t move through the blood vessels.”
WISH-TV has been tracking the problem for years, including a frank 2023 conversation with former United States Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams.
“This can cause debilitating pain,” he explained. “I mean, literally crippling pain. People with sickle cell are frequently in the hospital and they often unfortunately die prematurely,” Adams told us during a Daybreak ‘Morning Checkup’.
The vast majority of people with Sickle Cell disease are Black. Hampton says 69% of sufferers have Medicaid as a primary form of insurance. That’s where one specific focus of the statehouse event comes in.
“When people get to the age of 18, the Medicaid usually stops,” Hampton told viewers. “The children’s program is a type of insurance besides Medicaid that a person can have. So if we expand the children’s program, that means that people that would normally not qualify for Medicaid could qualify for insurance that would cover not only their basic health care, but also their care for sickle cell.”
Hampton encourages everyone interested in or affected by sickle cell to attend the statehouse event. It’s from 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. in the Second Floor South Atrium.
Source: WISHTV
