Letter: Bill supports biomarker testing
This letter originally ran in the Lincoln Journal Star.
News
TIME magzine cover story on the health care crisis and cancer
March 5, 2009
TIME magazine is running two stories about the health care crisis that prominently feature the American Cancer Society and the Health Insurance Assistance Service (HIAS), a call service for patients who have questions pertaining to health insurance. One of the stories will be on the cover of this week's issue, which hits newsstands Friday, March 6.
The Health-Care Crisis Hits Home
By: Karen Tumulty
When you've been strong and fit your whole life, it can be easy to discount your body's first whispers of sickness as merely the side effects of daily living. Looking back over the past three years, my older brother Patrick now understands the meaning of his increasingly frequent bouts of fatigue, his fluctuating appetite and the fact that his blood pressure had crept up to 150/90. But Pat had always put off going to the doctor until he had to. Having bought health insurance that carried a $2,500 deductible, he knew he would have to pay for a checkup himself. That is no small consideration for someone who makes $9 an hour, as my brother did in his job as an administrative assistant for a lighting firm in San Antonio. He also struggles with Asperger's syndrome, a disorder sometimes described as high-functioning autism. Pat can multiply three-digit numbers in his head with ease, but he has trouble accepting the unfamiliar and adjusting to the unforeseen.
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But 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; 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 a $1,120 monthly premium for coverage with the state's high-risk insurance pool. (Facebook users, comment on the story below.)
What makes these cases terrifying, in addition to heartbreaking, is that they reveal the hard truth about this country's health-care system: just about anyone could be one bad diagnosis away from financial ruin. Most people get their coverage where they work. But Anna McCourt, a supervisor at the ACS call center, says employees often have difficulty understanding the jargon in insurance policies. Even human-resources personnel may not fully understand all the intricacies of a policy when briefing a new employee. Coverage that seems generous when you are healthy eight annual doctor visits or three radiation courses quickly proves insufficient if you find yourself really sick.
Link to full Time Magazine article
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Cancer and Insurance: Who Do You Call?
By: Hilary Hylton
For families stricken with cancer, the phone number is relatively easy to remember: 1-800-ACS-2345. The letters stands for the American Cancer Society and dialing the number takes you to the ACS's National Cancer Information Center in Austin, Texas. The call center fields about a million calls a year, offering answers to the most simple questions and the most complex, from "Where can I get help with transportation when I can't drive to chemo appointments?" to "How do I find insurance if my illness forces me to quit my job?"
Half of 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 with 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 so-called COBRA rules. Others are looking for access to sometimes pricey state-funded high-risk pools, and 72% of the callers are simply uninsured. So intense and complex is the insurance issue that, in 2004, the ACS launched the Health Insurance Assistance Service (HIAS) within the call center operations. Made up of a small group of specialists, the HIAS fields questions about insurance, both private and state, and helps patients navigate the system. (See stories of cancer survivors.)