Crush of cancer, medical bills snares family

[RedEarth]

WEST PALM BEACH, Florida (CNN) — Leslie Elder’s eyelids fluttered open, and through the fog of pain medication, she saw the emergency room doctors pull back the curtain in her room.

She could tell that the news was bad.

“They didn’t have to say a word. I knew from their faces that something wasn’t right,” said Elder, 60, who hours earlier had stumbled into the ER with a stabbing pain in her abdomen. “Then one doctor said, ‘Your right kidney … it’s breaking apart. You have a tumor … and you also have a tumor in your left kidney.’ “

The words “You have a tumor” were not new to Elder; her grim financial situation was.

Elder had cancer twice before — in 1988, doctors found a tumor in her right breast, and in 2001, they found one in her left breast — except back then, she was insured. By the time she learned that she had kidney cancer in September 2005, she was uninsured.

“All I could think of was ‘Oh, my god, I’m going to go broke. We’ll be living in a cardboard house,’ ” Elder said. ” ‘How am I going to do this?’ It was the most honest feeling of powerlessness.”

Elder and her husband, Jim, say their health insurance carrier, Nationwide Insurance, forced them into an impossible situation by raising the rates on their policy over several years. Eventually, they were forced to cancel.

http://www.pnhp.org/news/2009/october/crush_of_cancer_med.php