What Happens When You Can’t Afford Breast Cancer Reconstruction?
Disease took their breasts. Mounting bills may keep it that way.Dee Mautz has breast cancer. She also has health insurance. But after her diagnosis, it didn’t help much: When a bill arrived for $100,000 and only $276 was paid by her policy, she found out her insurer considered chemotherapy an “experimental treatment.
I didn’t tell my employer about my diagnosis at first. Going to work helped me; it felt like I was not allowing the cancer to defeat me. I’m a United Nations representative for an international NGO, overseeing programming for girls in emergencies. I love what I do, but I’ve never been paid so low in my life. We just got a new insurance plan with an $8,000 deductible. After you meet it, depending on the procedure, they reimburse up to 30 percent of the cost.
I had stayed calm until that point, but then I got hysterical, because just as I was learning all this, claims started coming back from my insurance company saying “denied, denied, denied.” I never get sick, so when we were choosing an insurance policy I picked the most basic package. But I did see that specialty care was covered 100 percent. I called them and said, “I don’t understand, why are these claims being denied? I got a bill for $100,000, and $276 was all that was covered.
I finished chemo in July, and then I went in for a double mastectomy. I had to have a double, because I’m BRCA-2 positive. The saving grace had been that up until this point, the hospital’s stance was as long as you’re paying a little bit every month, there’s nothing else they can ask for. But when they made out my plan for surgery, they said because our insurance won’t cover everything, we had to pay for certain things up front or they wouldn’t do it at all. I just lost it.
A few great friends chipped in for surgery fees, and I started the process. Nobody in their right mind says they’ll get reconstruction “just because.” TheWhen my kids went back to school this fall, one of my girlfriends bought their backpacks. The money I would have spent on backpacks went toward bills. I have an amazing support system, and I’m fortunate for that. We’re just taking it day by day. Even the littlest things help.
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