Obamacare lightens load for cancer patients

Fiona O'Connell is familiar with the working person's health care nightmare — the one where you get too sick to work, and then you lose your job, and then you have no insurance to pay for the treatment you need.

O'Connell lived that nightmare, and she's still bitter and angry.

But now she can talk about it in the past tense. As of Jan. 1, the cancer survivor has medical insurance under the Affordable Care Act. One of the central provisions of the law is that no one can be denied coverage or charged higher premiums because of a pre-existing condition. And there are no annual or lifetime caps on insurance coverage.

"Until this year, if you had cancer or a history of cancer, you were out of luck," said Karen Pollitz of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which researches health care and health care policy. "That's different now. It's a historic change."

It's also a change that can make the difference between life and death. According to the Barack Obama administration, Americans who are uninsured and diagnosed with cancer are 60 percent more likely to die of that cancer than those who have insurance.

But Pollitz and other experts say the federal health overhaul, as important as it is, does not solve all the problems facing such patients. A Kaiser tracking poll found that, despite government subsidies, some people still can't afford their premiums or find the out-of-pocket costs (deductibles, copays and coinsurance) too burdensome.

Such expenses are capped at $6,350 a year for an individual and $12,700 for a family, but "that's more than a lot of people can afford," Pollitz said.

In addition, because the sign-up process was new and complicated, some patients are finding that doctors they thought were covered by their new insurance plans are outside their network, which means they have to pay a higher share of the cost of their care if they choose to stay with previous providers.

While the stakes are especially high for cancer patients, their experiences also reflect the broader realities for consumers as they start to benefit from the federal health overhaul while confronting its complexities.

To O'Connell and several other cancer patients interviewed, however, any drawbacks are a small price to pay for access to good medical care.

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http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/ct-aca-cancer-met--20140525,0,6311960.story