Article “She gets special help for sick kids”

 From her office near the Las Vegas airport, McGee and her staff scour cheap-ticket Web sites and solicit donated seats from airlines, relying on foundation grants and individual donations to fund their $3 million budget.

 “These kids wouldn’t get the help they need without these flights,” says Diane Wilde, surgery coordinator for a Denver, Colo., practice that treats rare respiratory diseases.  “Ann is a national hero.”

McGee has flown an Ohio girl with facial deformities for surgery and follow-up care in Dallas more than 40 times.  Then there are the Halbert twins – 5-year-olds Taylor and Kirsten.  Diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, a disorder that causes recurrent tumors, they travel from their Las Vegas home every few months to see a doctor in Salt Lake City.

“They said he was the best of the best,’ says mom Jennifer Halbert, a nurse who stopped working to care for her girls; her police-sergeant husband, Chris, works overtime to pay for uncovered medical costs.  Of McGee, she says, “It’s amazing one person can make such a difference.”

“We live for happy endings,” says McGee.  “The people we help are the miracles, their stories keep us going.  Given the growing costs of health care today and how often illnesses can lead to monetary troubles, the need and demand for the Miracle Flights for Kids program has never been greater.  When you think about it, everyone knows of someone whose family is struggling with a serious health problem.  No child in America should be denied proper medical treatment because of money.”

A woman with big ideas, tremendous drive, and a huge heart, Ann McGee has spent her life seeking ways to help make the lives of seriously ill children and their families just a little easier.

 Twenty-four years ago she recognized the need for the coordination of aviation services that could provide no cost transportation for blood, donor organs, and to quickly deliver sick children to medical facilities around the country. 

 Today, more than 60 thousand flights and 31 million miles later, Miracle Flights for Kids is the nation’s leading nonprofit medical flight organization.  Children from 39 different countries have been helped and the program continues to grow through individual donations, corporate sponsorships, and grants.

 After more than two decades Mcgee, the founder and president of one of the largest and most successful philanthropic flight organizations in the country, says she’s learned a few things over the years.

 “Probably the most important insight I’ve gained is just how significant a second opinion is.  Over the past 22 years, I’ve borne witness time and again to children who were suffering and even made worse from a misdiagnosis. Through the miracle of flight however, they were able to see that one specialist who could help them get better.  We want families across America to know the Miracle Flights for Kids program is here for them.”

It has often been said that every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.  For Las Vegas resident Ann McGee, it was the bell on her telephone that got her her “wings’ – in the form of an airplane – so that she could perform miracle flights every day.

The MFFK program provides America’s children and their parents with free flights to hospitals and treatment centers they could never otherwise visit because of financial hardship.

 McGee notes that Miracle Flights for Kids doesn’t get that many emergencies.  Rather, these children need to get to regularly scheduled appointments.  She can’t emphasize enough the importance of parents getting a second opinion, citing that there are 20,000 known diseases and that doctors know only the common ones.  In many cases, children who were dying because they were misdiagnosed are now thriving because they were flown to proper treatment.

 “Miracle Flights provides an option for parents,” McGee cites.  “Most of the people who call are financially challenged or ravaged by the disease, some spending $4,000 a month just on medications.  Most know where they need to go, whether for proper treatment or a second opinion, but need a way to get there.  I tell parents to take transportation off their worry list because we’ll get them there as many times as they need to go.”

“To use a French term, this cause is my raison d’etre, my reason for being,” McGee says.  “My greatest satisfaction is in knowing that the next time the phone rings, I can say ‘yes.’”

 This gives a potential donor good background information, but is it enough?

 At Miracle Flights for Kids, we take tremendous pride in being extremely efficient and mindful of how we spend the generous donations that make our mission possible.  At the end of the day, as we improve our efficiency we will be able to provide more flights for sick kids for our donor’s dollar.

 Yet equally important is the type of service we are providing.  Many of our flights are literally life-saving.  If an urgent flight request is made to save a child’s life and an immediate response means more money is spent on that particular flight, our efficiency may suffer.  However, we also saved a child’s life!

 Unfortunately, there are still no metrics in place among the many non-profit watchdog organizations to take the value of our service into account.  We may well let our overall efficiency suffer in order to save a child’s life, and therefore see their overall non-profit efficiency rating drop.

 In addition to financial statistics, we need non-profit watchdogs to expand their rating systems.

 “How many children’s lives did you save this year?” is never a question we are asked.  Yet shouldn’t it be the first?