New York’s program for ensuring health insurance to its most vulnerable population, children, is not required to provide access when those children, and their parents, need it most. Medicaid is required to provide such access; so are family plans purchased through private insurers. (My own plan, however, was an individual plan.) Somehow, CHP is not. So, instead, CHP delays the initiation of coverage of babies for 30 or 45 days after birth, depending on whether the baby is born before or after the 15th of the month. As representative after representative told me on the phone, when I called, with increasing desperation, from the maternity ward, “That’s policy.”

The only potential remedy is for parents to know to ask for a review, during which they can plead for CHP to backdate coverage. I found that out later, from a more forthcoming representative for the New York State of Health, when I called for comment on this story as a reporter rather than as a mom. That rep added that customer service employees are discouraged from telling parents that the appeals process exists, and that even being granted a review is no guarantee of success. “I’m sorry,” he told me. Had he, as a dad, been treated that way, he said, he “would be infuriated.” And I am hardly the first person to run into this problem with Child Health Plus: “It’s not rare for parents to be up in arms,” he said.

I reached out directly to Child Health Plus for comment as well but did not receive a response.

Some of those up-in-arms parents seem to have made a difference. New York State recently passed legislation addressing the issue and, as of January 2017, parents of newborns will be able to backdate Child Health Plus coverage to begin immediately upon the birth of their children.*

Even as a reasonably well-educated person with hard-won knowledge of the limitations of America’s health-care system, I was unprepared for this level of dysfunction. For 40-some weeks, I had been pregnant on a plan purchased on an Obamacare exchange: first bronze and then, when the year changed and my delivery loomed, platinum. My pregnancy on that plan transformed me into a far savvier medical consumer, and a far more jaundiced one. Still, when my son was born, and I went through what I had been told would be the straightforward process of getting him signed up for insurance, I was stymied.

Not 12 hours after bringing a new human being into the world, before I had slept or showered or gone more than a few feet from my bed in the maternity ward, I was on the phone with the New York State of Health. I answered all of the rep’s questions, and she assured me she could sign my son up for Child Health Plus. Because he had been born after the 15th of March, his coverage would start in six weeks.

That can’t be possible, I said. Obviously he needs insurance now. We were in a hospital. He already had his first pediatrician’s appointment scheduled, and he would have to have several more before May 1, which would include vaccinations as well as whatever else the doctors considered necessary.