COOPER: Tonight, a piece of the health care reform debate that we've heard a lot about: how a serious illness can bankrupt you even if you have health insurance. We buy insurance, of course, for peace of mind, to protect us. That's what the family you're about to meet thought they were buying. But it's not what they ended up with.
360 MD Sanjay Gupta is "Keeping Them Honest."
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Four years ago, Leslie Elder staggered into an emergency room with a stabbing pain in her abdomen. The doctor's diagnosis: grim.
LESLIE ELDER, DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER: Your right kidney is -- is breaking apart. You have a tumor. All I could think of is -- I have no insurance. What am I going to do?
GUPTA: Her problem started nearly 20 years before. In 1987, Elder and her husband Jim, middle class homeowners, bought a comprehensive health insurance policy. They paid their premiums faithfully. A year later, Leslie got sick. It was breast cancer.
(on camera): Did you worry about paying for it? Paying for the medical care?
ELDER: No. At that time I had good coverage.
GUPTA (voice-over): She beat that cancer. Then the unthinkable: 13 years later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer again.
ELDER: As I'm recuperating, I receive $21,000 of bills that I was responsible for.
GUPTA (on camera): So same insurance and you're probably not thinking about the bills again?
ELDER: Of course I wasn't. But -- it would be the same as it was before, wouldn't it?
GUPTA (voice-over): No. Not exactly. Since Elder's first cancer diagnosis, the cost of health insurance had skyrocketed. A recent Kaiser Family Foundation Study found that over the past ten years a typical family insurance premium more than doubled. The Elders say theirs quadrupled.
ELDER: We're not poor. We didn't do this. I didn't plan all this cancer. What happened here?
GUPTA: The premium would have been even higher, except the Elders were playing a risky yet common game. To keep their premiums affordable, they kept raising their deductible. So by Leslie's second cancer diagnosis, the deductible was up to $5,000. And her story became the anatomy of a medical bankruptcy.
Elder is convinced that her carrier, Nationwide Insurance, raised her rate exorbitantly because of her history of cancer.
ELDER: They had me between a rock and a hard place. There's nobody else going to insure her; totally uninsurable, totally.
GUPTA: Nationwide denies any inference that the company inappropriately raised the Elders' rates. The company says that increases were done in full compliance with state laws.
But "Keeping Them Honest," we reached out to the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation," which oversees companies like Nationwide and is supposed to protect consumers like the Elders.
The agency said that in Florida there is no law that limits the amount of rate requested by an insurer. But that it tries to insure that premiums are not excessive or unfairly discriminatory.
The Elders ask, what does excessive really mean? After all, they're on the edge of bankruptcy. Although a relative paid for her kidney cancer treatment, she has depleted the family savings and is still paying for her second breast cancer treatment.
ELDER: There is no good policy. You're going to be paying and paying and paying.
GUPTA: The Elders eventually dropped their policy. They have no insurance. And Leslie says she hates the odds that she's facing.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN, New York.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: You're hearing more and more stories just like that.
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