Parents Guilty of Manslaughter of Their 8-Year-Old Son

     I read this article on foxnews and it was disturbing on many levels.  Monica Hussing and William Robinson, parents of eight year old Willie Jr., plead guilty in an Ohio court to involuntary manslaughter of their son.  Willie Jr. suffered from Hodgkin lymphoma and eventually died from it.  The reason his parents were brought to court was because it would appear that they were negligent in seeking care for their son when he became ill.  The couple did not have health insurance and claim that they could not afford to pay for checkups, let alone cancer treatment.
     As a parent, I couldn't imagine denying my son medical attention if he became ill.  The way that this article was written, it tried to make it appear as if these parents did just this, however, according to their daughter, they did seek help from social services and other non-profit organizations to try to get an evaluation of their son's condition, but were unable to get help that they could afford.  I have had a difficult time finding affordable health insurance since moving to Joplin, but I continued looking until I found it.  I have to put my children's well-being ahead of anything else.  Health insurance is my third highest expense after my home and food (basic necessities of survival).  Even though it seems that these parents did try to find someone to help them, the article goes on to mention how they turned down an offer to evaluate their son for $180.  At about the same time, they did, however, find a way to pay $87 for a dog to get a flea treatment.  This statement, along with the fact that the parents did not have any kind of insurance for their kids, leads me to believe that they were indeed guilty of manslaughter.  They obviously did not have their priorities straight.
     Even if I use this logic to justify the sentencing of the parents to prison for eight years, I know that there is still something else wrong with this picture.  Millions of parents are not able to afford medical insurance for their kids in this country.  Priorities might play a role in many of these families' inability to get insurance, but it has also become acceptable among Americans to not purchase insurance.  Another issue is what will happen to this couple's other kids?  They will become wards of the state and be forced into foster homes.  Unfortunately this article doesn't go into enough detail about the kind of home these parents were providing, but I would hope that it would have been better than being raised as a foster child.  I think that this shows that something needs to be done to the sky-rocketing insurance costs in this country.  I know that medical treatments are expensive, but the amounts that are being billed to insurance companies are overly inflated.  If there is a way to find a middle ground, I would be all for it.  If we don't seek ways to improve our health care problems, more children like Willie Jr. will perish.