Word: patient
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...falling ill without adequate insurance leaves you at risk no matter where you live. Since 2005, the American Cancer Society (ACS) has maintained a national call center for cancer patients struggling with their bills. In that time, more than 21,000 people have called in asking for help. Every story is different, but the contours of the problem tend to be depressingly similar: the 10-year-old leukemia patient in Ohio who, after three rounds of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, had almost exhausted the maximum $1.5 million lifetime benefit allowed under her father's employer-provided plan...
...grateful as we were for Smolens' forbearance, that still left us with the question of how to keep up with the rapidly mounting bills for drugs and lab work. Haile put us in touch with B.J. Smith, a social worker at the center. Patient and reassuring, Smith turned out to be the angel we needed. She had only recently returned to work after taking off seven years to stay home with her two children. The first thing she advised Pat was to start paying his bills, all of them, even if it meant putting down only a few dollars...
Half the calls coming into the center deal with paying for treatment, either because lifetime limits on policies are quickly reached - cancer is one of the five most costly medical conditions in the U.S., according to the ACS - or because the patient is struggling to maintain coverage in the face of rising premiums and accumulating co-pay costs. Some, having been forced by illness to stop working, must struggle to keep their employer-sponsored coverage through COBRA rules. Others are looking for access to sometimes pricey state-funded high-risk pools, and 72% of the callers are simply uninsured...
...insurance policies. Even human-resources personnel may not fully understand all the intricacies of a policy when briefing a new employee. Also, coverage that appears adequate at first glance may fall short - eight annual doctor visits or three radiation courses may initially seem sufficient, but a breast-cancer patient can require many more visits and multiple radiation courses in just a few weeks of treatment...
...level of detail necessary to navigate the system is astounding. For example, each state receives funding under the auspices of the Centers for Disease Control for breast- and cervical-cancer screening, but unless the patient knows exactly which clinic is utilizing those federal funds on a specific day and time, the screening may not be covered by the CDC funds, McCourt says. Specialists can guide patients through that bureaucratic maze and brief them on the right questions to ask and even the right language to use when making an appointment to ensure the screening is covered...