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Despite having private health insurance, cancer patients are running up
large debts, filing for personal bankruptcy, and even delaying or
forgoing treatment because they can't afford care, a new report from
the American Cancer Society and the Kaiser Family Foundation shows.
The report, Spending to Survive: Cancer Patients
Confront Holes in the Health Insurance System,
was released today at a joint press event held at the Kaiser Family
Foundation building in Washington, DC. It's based on an analysis of
individual calls to the American Cancer Society’s Health Insurance
Assistance Service (HIAS), a service that connects cancer patients with
health insurance specialists. The report features the stories of 20
people who have contacted the service.
Among the patients profiled are lymphoma survivor Michael Courtney, 41,
whose employer-sponsored insurance had a pre-existing condition
exclusion that caused his treatments to be postponed, and Patricia
Dougherty, 58, whose out-of-network treatment for ovarian cancer led to
mountains of medical debt. The report also details the cases of
Catherine Guinn, 24, a lymphoma patient who was forced to continue
working during her cancer treatment in order to maintain her insurance
coverage, and Taylor Wilhite, 10, whose leukemia treatments are close
to exhausting her family policy's $1 million lifetime maximum.
"Cancer patients too often find out that their insurance
doesn't
protect them when they need care the most," said John R. Seffrin, PhD,
national chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. "High
out-of-pocket costs coupled with the high cost of insurance premiums
can force cancer patients to incur huge debt, and to delay or forego
life-saving treatments."
The report highlights five major shortcomings in the current private
health insurance system:
1. High cost-sharing and caps on benefits leave cancer patients
vulnerable.
2. If they become too sick to work, people with employer-sponsored
coverage may not be protected from high costs.
3. Cancer patients and survivors are often unable to find adequate,
affordable coverage in individual insurance markets.
4. High-risk insurance pools, which are designed to help
cancer
patients and others who have trouble getting insurance, aren't
available in all states, and when they are available, they're often
much more expensive.
5. Cancer patients who are too sick to work often find
themselves
without any coverage options because of long waiting periods,
eligibility restrictions, and application delays.
At the press event, the Kaiser Family Foundation also unveiled
a
documentary entitled "The Cost of Cancer" that profiles 3 people who
are struggling with the disease and its financial toll. A panel
discussion will take place afterwards.
"The stories of people with cancer in this study and video
documentary show what our earlier survey work found: that the insurance
system often fails people when they need it most, when they get really
sick," said Kaiser Family Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman,
PhD.
For more information about what the American Cancer Society is doing to improve access to quality health care, see our Access to Care initiative.
ACS News Center stories are provided as a source of cancer-related
news and are not intended to be used as
press releases.
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