Word: treatment
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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; the Connecticut grocery-store worker who put off the radiation treatments for her Stage 2 breast cancer because she had used up her company plan's $20,000 annual maximum and was $18,000 in debt; the New Hampshire accountant who, unable to work during his treatment for Stage 3B stomach cancer, had to stop paying his mortgage to afford...
After 33 years of wrestling with insurance companies, Deborah Haile, payment coordinator at the San Antonio Kidney Disease Center, where Pat went for 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...
...woman who has been working with the system for about a year. What alarms her most about the new patients she has seen lately, Eaton says, is how long people wait - diabetics whose feet are numb, cancer patients already in the advanced stages of the disease - before they seek treatment. "When people fall on hard times, they're kind of embarrassed," Eaton says. "Their health care ends up becoming much more expensive." (Facebook users, comment on the story below...
...Smolens is trying to figure out whether Pat, whose Asperger's gives him a low tolerance for the demands of a complicated medical regimen, should move from his current medications to a more aggressive approach that includes immuno suppressing chemotherapy drugs. The newer drugs can cost $10,000 a treatment; even the old ones can easily run $500 a month. "It's almost like a black hole in terms of the potential costs," Smolens told me. "But when you look at the alternative - progressive kidney failure - then you're talking about having to receive dialysis, and the average cost...
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...