Politics & Power Quote by Patrick J. Kennedy

A good politician’s trick is to make policy failure feel like a family emergency, and Patrick J. Kennedy does it here with a brutal, specific image: parents forced to surrender custody just to get a child treated. The line is engineered to collapse the comfortable distance between “insurance” (a bureaucratic abstraction) and the most primal American unit of meaning, the family. It’s not a budget argument; it’s an accusation.

The intent is clear: reframe the lack of health coverage, especially for mental health and complex pediatric care, as a state-created moral scandal. “Broken apart” is deliberately marital language, the vocabulary of divorce and tragedy, applied to a system that pretends to be merely administrative. Kennedy’s numbers (“well over 60,000”) do rhetorical double duty: big enough to signal crisis, precise enough to sound audited, a move meant to disarm skeptics who’d rather call it anecdote.

The subtext is sharper. If the “only way” to get care is to hand your child to the state, then the market isn’t just inefficient; it’s coercive. The government becomes both villain and reluctant rescuer: it underwrites a system where parents are punished for being poor or underinsured, then steps in as guardian when the family can’t meet the price of entry.

Contextually, this lands in the long U.S. argument over whether health care is a commodity or a civic guarantee. Kennedy, carrying the legacy of a family synonymous with liberal reform, is also pushing against stigma: by centering children, he makes treatment morally non-negotiable. The line doesn’t ask for sympathy; it dares you to accept the trade.