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After a months-long fight with Texas Medicaid over coverage of a gene therapy, Afghan refugees now have a chance to save their infant son. After initially balking, Texas officials have agreed to pay for the costly treatment, the boy’s family and his doctor told STAT.
At the end of last week, N. Pashai’s cell phone rang. It was from a Minnesota area code. He answered, and through an interpreter, he heard the words he and his family have spent the last few months praying for. Doctors at M Health Fairview, a research hospital in Minneapolis associated with the University of Minnesota, were going to attempt to cure his 4-and-a-half month-old son Sufyan with an experimental gene therapy.
“Even as she said it, I still felt doubt,” Pashai told STAT through an interpreter on a video call. “I kept asking her again and again, are you sure it’s the full approval, the full approval?”
During the United States’ long war against the Taliban, he worked security for an elite unit of American-trained Afghan special forces, and due to the sensitive...