Jimmy Kimmel family’s health scare leads to on-air plea,
Jimmy Kimmel opened his late-night show Monday on a very serious note.
“I have a story to tell about something that happened to our family last week,” he said on ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” as he started to get choked up.
“I’m sorry. You know, I try not to get emotional, but it was a scary story. And before I go into it, I want you to know it has a happy ending, OK? So when I’m tell- ing this, don’t get too upset. Leave that to me.”
Kimmel went on to say that his wife, Molly, had given birth to their second child on April 21, a boy named Billy. Everything seemed nor-
mal at first, but then a nurse discovered that Billy had a heart murmur and noticed his skin was a bit purple. Kimmel described the terror of watching a group of very worried-looking doc- tors and nurses trying to figure out what was wrong with his newborn son.
Eventually, they told him that Billy was born with a heart condition and would
immediately require surgery. They took Billy in an ambu- lance to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he had open-heart surgery.
“It was the longest three hours of my life,” Kimmel tearfully told the audience.
But the procedure went well, and six days later, he and his wife were able to take Billy home.
“President Trump last month proposed a $6 bil- lion cut in funding to the National Institute of Health, and thank God our congressmen made a deal last night to not go along with that. They actually increased funding by $2 billion, and I applaud them for doing that,” Kimmel said. “Because more than 40
percent of the people who would have been affected by those cuts to the National Institute of Health are children.
“We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, but until a few years ago, mil
lions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all,” he added. “Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you had a preexisting condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition, and if your parents didn’t have medical insur- ance, you might not even live long enough to get denied
because of a pre-existing condition.”
He ended with a plea for both sides of the aisle in the health care debate.
“If your baby is going to die, and it doesn’t have to, it shouldn’t matter how much money you make. I think that’s something now, whether you’re a Republi- can or Democrat, or some-
thing else, we all agree on that, right?” Kimmel said, as the audience applauded.
“Whatever your party, whatever you believe, whoever you support, we need to make sure that people who are supposed to represent us — and people who are meeting about this right now in Washington — under- stand that very clearly. Let’s stop with the nonsense. This isn’t football, there are no teams. We are the team, it’s the United States. Don’t let their partisan squabbles divide us on something every decent person wants. We need to care of each other.”