Free Market Medicine
Sep 23rd, 2007 at 6:36 am by Susie
On a late June morning, Ms. Loewe lay in bed, emaciated and writhing in pain. Her left arm and hand were swollen to three times their size from lymphedema, a side effect of her breast surgery. Embarrassed by her appearance, she hid the huge black scar left on the top of her head by her brain surgery under a grey beret.
She reacted little when told that her ordeal could have been avoided had she gone to a different clinic back in 2003. “It’s very complicated when you don’t have health insurance,” she whispered. “I really don’t understand it much.”
Ms. Loewe died on June 25 at age 55. Her daughter sold her car to pay for her cremation.
And somehow, people think national healthcare would be so much worse than this:
LONGVIEW, Texas — In June 2003, Shirley Loewe went to Good Shepherd Medical Center here with a softball-size lump in her breast and was diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer. She didn’t know it, but she had just made a big mistake.
Ms. Loewe was uninsured. Under federal law, she could have gotten Medicaid coverage — and saved herself a lot of hardship — if she’d gone to a different clinic less than a half-mile away. But by walking through Good Shepherd’s doors, Ms. Loewe unwittingly let that opportunity slip and embarked on a four-year journey through the Byzantine U.S. health-care system.
It was an odyssey that would take her to five hospitals, two clinics, two charitable organizations and two nursing homes in two states. She was denied assistance or care at least six times along the way, for reasons that ranged from not being poor enough to not being sick enough.
Ms. Loewe eventually got treatment, but at personal cost and great aggravation. To qualify for charity assistance, she had to reduce her $15,000-a-year income as a hairdresser by cutting back on her working hours and giving up her home. Later, she lucked into first-class care thanks to a serendipitous encounter at a Little League game.
Ms. Loewe is one of thousands of women who get caught in a loophole in the Breast and Cervical Cancer Prevention and Treatment Act each year. Under the little-known law passed by Congress in 2000, uninsured women under age 65 who are diagnosed with breast or cervical cancer can have their treatment covered by Medicaid, the government-funded health program for the poor, even if they don’t meet all of its eligibility criteria.
