With Son in Remission, a Family Struggles to Find Coverage - NYTimes.com

With Son in Remission, a Family Struggles to Find Coverage - NYTimes.com:

"Now the Walkers face the possibility that Jake will no longer be seen at Houston’s renowned M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which they credit for his remission.

“You realize how vulnerable you really are,” said Ms. Walker, who exhibits the maternal ferocity of a black bear. “You just — not give up — but you just feel that you’re at a loss, that you’re at your wits’ end. I ask myself, ‘Do I really have to lose my home to save my son’s life?’ ”

Neither of the Walkers has been able to land a job with the kind of large group coverage that would disregard Jake’s health status. His cancer history effectively makes him uninsurable on the individual market. He is too old to qualify for Medicaid as a child, and it is virtually impossible in Texas to qualify as an able-bodied adult.

Because the Walkers own their modest house, they have been told they do not merit other government assistance. With little predictable income beyond Ms. Walker’s $688 unemployment check every two weeks, the family cannot afford the state’s high-risk insurance pool or continuation coverage through the federal Cobra law.

To date, Jake’s treatment has cost nearly $2 million. Almost all of it has been paid by Cigna under a preferred-provider family policy that Ms. Walker paid $426.28 a month for through DHL, the troubled shipping company where she worked as a billing agent.

Until last fall, Mr. Walker was the co-owner of a business that supplied DHL with trucks and drivers, but it too fell victim to downsizing. The feed store, the last in an area where suburbs are swallowing ranchland, has been losing money.

What has made the Walkers feel most helpless, though, is that their son has been left so exposed, after all he has endured.

“Your job as a parent is to protect your children at any cost,” Ms. Walker said. “I really felt like I had let him down.”"

At the beginning of the article, Mrs. Walker's salary was noted to be $37,000. She paid, out of that, $426 a month for her health insurance (admittedly, pretty darn good insurance given the expense of Jake's treatment). $426 x 12 = $5112 per year bringing her salary down almost 14%, not counting the subsidy on the employer side, probably close to another $5K.

The economic costs are brutal enough, but the fear, uncertainty, and skimping on care (prescriptions, skipping office visits, etc.) are just not acceptable in the richest country in the world.

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