An overdose killed her son. Then the legislators in California asked them to save others

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Deep breath.

Christine Matlock Dougherty inhaled, set up her lips and slowly breathed out.

She stared carefully at the Scrabble game on her phone and tried to calm her nerves when she was waiting to testify before the meeting of the meeting.

Deep breath.

She checked her texts. She switched to a dice game.

“Sometimes it will be a little bit,” she said quietly.

On a sunny afternoon in the last month, she was the privilege that no parent wanted: the chance of convincing a room full of legislators to repair the broken system from which he believes that he contributed to the death of her child.

For the second time in two weeks, she would testify to the health insurance industry in front of the state legislator as an important witness for not one, but two separate invoices. They belonged to several such measures that were infiltrated by the Capitol and hurried by the public outrage, which, according to the fatal shootout of the Chief Executive Officer, of Unitedhealthcare last December.

In an attempt to enforce political reforms on commercial health plans, the legislators had invited Dougherty to share the history of their family. Matt Haney, a democratic gathering from San Francisco, said her story inspired him to arrange one of the bills for which she would testify, a measure that is intended to prevent health plans from putting patients from the treatment institutions of substance consumption early.

Today it would not be possible to testify for the first time; She had recently flown to the capital to speak in order to speak in the name of a legislative template for which health plans were required to report data to the state, how often they refuse to treat. Before that, she hadn't been in Sacramento for years because her young family had made a road trip here when the children were small. They had taken a photo of their son Ryan, who stood in the captain next to the bronze bear.

Dougherty's fingernails painted in sparkling, bright pastels to delight the first graders of the Yucaipa primary school where she works, rested on eight leaves. There, the double distance at a 20-point font was the chain of events that ended with Ryan, who died at the age of 23 on an overdose of fentanyl.

But how does one detect a nightmare in two minutes that took four years? The rejection of the reporting by covering her son for her son's addiction treatment. His following discharge from the rehabilitation facility. The legal dispute that she submitted.

The assembly room was overcrowded.

Was it hot here?

Dougherty had visited a public speech class in college. The day she was supposed to give her first speech, she felt so nervous that she was passed on. But now that after teaching for more than three decades, she knew the trick: sounds confident and they will believe them.

She knew that she was here that Ryan would have liked. She wanted to make him proud.

“It helps me to find a reason why he was,” she said.

Dougherty cried several times this morning on the flight from Palm Springs to Sacramento. Since Ryan's death, even the smallest things could cause tears. The color of a shirt. A song on the radio.

A few days were better than others.

“Everything I do is to breathe,” she said to a reporter.

During today's hearing, she would testify a legislative template that checked the authorization of a patient until at least 28 days after approval of an in-net work provider to check the treatment of treatment in the treatment of treatment that would prevent treatment. Ryan's health plan had decided that he would no longer cover his stay in the treatment facility after spending only three days there.

He had overdosed less than 48 hours after his sister picked him up and drove home.

Dougherty took her place in the middle of the overcrowded listening room of the meeting. She waited when the members of the committee discussed other legislative proposals that were supposed to restrict the power of insurers through the patients.

An hour passed.

And then finally Dougherty's train.

She went to the front of the room and placed her place at the table in front of the legislators. One of the sponsors of the law had told her that when she felt nervous, she should train her eyes to the committee chairman, Mia Bonta, a democratic meeting from Oakland.

Bonta had a son.

Haney introduced the bill. Dougherty had never seen him. Now he informed the committee that other states have already passed laws to tackle the problem, “California is not acting”.