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He has fought on two fronts. One is directed at barring insurance companies from setting lifetime caps on compensation for spinal-cord injuries and catastrophic coverage in general. His own round-the-clock care costs $400,000 a year, which is dispersed among 24-hour-a-day nurses, aides who lift him, expensive drugs and checkups by various specialist physicians. It does not include the capital costs of equipment or of turning his garage into a gym for his therapies.
His insurance cap was $1.2 million, which would be exhausted in three years. He did not want to make a full-time nurse of his wife Dana, who has her own successful career as wife, mother, actress and singer. He makes the point that while he has the resources to engage a team of professional help, most patients do not, and would soon be forced to seek Medicaid. When, early in the year, Vermont Senator James Jeffords sought Reeve's support for an amendment to the Kennedy-Kassebaum health bill affecting the portability of insurance if an employee moved from one job to another, he gladly signed on and sent a supporting letter to every U.S. Senator. For extraneous political reasons, the amendment was defeated, but narrowly, and its passage the next time around appears to be assured.
Mainly he has worked to raise money for spinal-cord research. Relatively little money has been spent on spinal-cord research because the small number of patients (around 11,000 a year) does not excite pharmaceutical companies. And the therapies may not involve drugs anyway. Few Nobel Prizes have gone to this research, and scientists have not been drawn to it. Yet, Reeve notes, spinal-cord research aids related diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, Lou Gehrig's disease and stroke.
Apart from the humane considerations, he argues, an investment in research would save the country billions of dollars. Spinal-cord injuries cost $8 billion a year in treatments; Alzheimer's, $90 billion. "I'm sitting listening to the budget debate," he says. "A lot of it is over Medicare. And I'm thinking that the way to save the Medicare-Medicaid issue, the way to turn it around, instead of talking about cuts, is to talk about research and the efficacy of research. Because you won't have to pay to maintain injured people. We get things done in this country based on incentives, not just the goodness of our hearts."
In September he appeared on television with Barbara Walters and made his first public appeal for research funds. Walters conducted a remarkably thoughtful interview, equally touching and restrained. Reeve said that on his 50th birthday he would like to stand and raise a glass to all who helped him. He is now 43. The audience response was overwhelming. Shortly afterward he made a similar appeal on the Today show, on which Katie Couric conducted a careful five-day-long series on the subject.