When staying alive means going bankrupt

When staying alive means going bankrupt
Health insurance didn’t keep cancer-stricken California woman solvent

By Mike Stuckey
Senior news editor
MSNBC
Updated: 6:17 a.m. ET Aug. 15, 2007

In our second Gut Check America vote, readers rated health care as the issue of most concern for them. After a false start in Oregon, we found reader Kathleen Aldrich, a Lompoc, Calif., resident who wrote to us about how her battle with cancer drove her to bankruptcy, even though she had health insurance. Here is her story:


LOMPOC, Calif. - Kathleen Aldrich, financially ruined by two bouts with ovarian cancer, is not who you might assume she is.

She raised three kids as a single mom. She worked hard for years. She had good jobs. She paid her bills. She lived in a nice house and drove a nice car. She had a decent credit rating. She had health insurance.

Now she has a record of bankruptcy and is the embodiment of the fear that nags at millions of U.S. families: that they are but one medical calamity away from losing everything. Like Aldrich, they — and perhaps you — could be.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Aldrich says thoughtfully, sitting in the neat, pale green living room of her tiny stucco duplex in the middle of this mostly middle-class American town. “I don’t see that I did.”

snip//

But her life is hardly idyllic. Two years and four months after her second trip through the hell of chemotherapy, Aldrich is embarking on the painful new journey of trying to rebuild her life and her credit rating. The bankruptcy has quashed all thoughts that she might someday retire. More immediately, it has left her unable to obtain thousands of dollars of work on her teeth, which likely were weakened by the powerful anti-cancer drugs.

And it has left deeper wounds of shame and guilt over having to walk away from unpaid bills after a lifetime of responsible living.

more...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20201807/

And those of us who very well could be some day.

'medical insurance' is just a ticket to get you in the door for some treatments of a serious illness. Then you get billed for all the stuff it won't pay from labs, doctors, hospitals, prescriptions, and before you know it they walk in my door to try to get tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical debt discharged.

this country's medical payment system is run by crooks, liars and cheats, and it is utterly shameful.