Word: brotherly
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...round of tests in December. Soon after that, Pat discovered that his urine had turned brown and foamy. In the middle of all this, he was laid off from his job, and finding a new one while doing temp work was his most pressing concern. Finally, last July my brother's doctor insisted that he see a specialist, who quickly ordered a biopsy. That's when Pat, who is now 54, learned that his kidneys were failing...
...previous four weeks had left my brother with more than $14,000 in bills from hospitals, doctors and labs. And that was just to figure out what was wrong with him. Actually treating his disease was going to be unimaginably more expensive. Patrick needed help quickly, and we didn't have a clue where or how to start looking...
...treatment, has pretty much figured out the system. So when I put in my first desperate call to her, on Aug. 20, 2008, she offered to make another run at Assurant. Within an hour, Haile called back, her voice bristling with anger. "Cancel that policy," she advised me. "Your brother is wasting his money on premiums, and he's going to need...
...holds a job, it would be difficult for him to qualify for Social Security disability benefits. While Texas, like 34 other states, has a high-risk pool for those who are hard to insure, the program is twice as expensive as an average individual health-insurance policy. And my brother would have to wait 12 months to join with a pre- existing condition, under the state's "adverse selection" regulations that seek to prevent uninsured people from joining the pool only after they get sick...
...individual health-care consumer has very little power or information. Still, it turns out that there are ways to fight back. As I was reporting my brother's story, I discovered something about Pat's former insurance company: last May, insurance regulators in Connecticut imposed a record $2.1 million in penalties on two Assurant subsidiaries for allegedly engaging unfairly in a practice called postclaims underwriting - combing through short-term policyholders' medical records to find pretexts to deny their claims or rescind their policies. In one case, a woman whose non-Hodgkin's lymphoma was diagnosed in 2005 was denied coverage...