The Financial Impact of Cancer: A Personal Story

(Editor"s Note: This is the first in a series of articles about how cancer can hurt a family"s finances. This article by cancerpage.com writer Richard Zmuda is his story about how cancer affected his family"s pocketbook.)

By Richard A. Zmuda, cancerpage.com

A cancer diagnosis is sometimes preceded by suspicion, and often symptoms. But it is always accompanied by shock. The phrase which turns over almost universally in the mind at that time of a cancer diagnosis is: “Life can turn on a dime.”

But after the shock of the diagnosis, the aftershocks appear—some in rapid succession, such as telling the children, telling other family members and friends, notifying an employer. Others occur more gradually, subtle worries at first and then becoming major fears. Often these are financial in nature, and they can be almost as overwhelming as the cancer itself. Paraphrasing the above metaphor, “Life can hinge on a dime,” as well.

As a higher percentage of the family’s income is siphoned away by healthcare costs, virtually every other aspect of their increasingly fragile quality of life is affected.

In our case, we were a young family when my wife was first diagnosed with breast cancer. We had twins in the first grade and a third child in kindergarten. I was a moderately successful freelance writer/editor and for the preceding four years my wife had been going to law school at night. She had just graduated and was a few months into a clerkship with a local judge; we were finally going to be a two-income family.

But the cancer diagnosis changed all that. An immediate mastectomy was recommended which, after a concurring second opinion at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she underwent. This was soon followed by months of chemotherapy and radiation. Then, because of the advanced stage at diagnosis, she was asked to consider a bone marrow transplant. At the time, the procedure involved a hospital stay of 3 ½ weeks, with massive doses of chemotherapy bombarding diseased bone marrow, followed by a gradual, somewhat dangerous recovery.

As we soon learned, our insurance carrier routinely refused to cover the cost of bone marrow transplants for breast cancer because the procedure was “experimental and unproven,” (and extremely expensive for them). Luckily for us, the same carrier had just been successfully sued by a breast cancer patient in California, a fact that was forcefully relayed to them through the appropriate channels. They quickly relented and the procedure was scheduled over the Christmas holiday—the only available opening.

While that Christmas was certainly somber for the family, New Year’s Eve was especially disconcerting for me. By an unfortunate coincidence of timing, the percentage of hospital costs that our insurance would cover dropped from 90 percent on December 31^st to 80 percent on January 1^st of that year. I will never forget sitting in that hospital room on New Year’s Eve watching the clock tick midnight and thinking that this was going to be my costliest New Year’s Eve ever.

The total cost of that one hospital stay exceeded $137,000, most of which unfortunately accrued after January 1^st. And the total treatments during the preceding six months and the subsequent eight months totaled more than $200,000. You do the math.

And while the life of a freelance writer afforded me great flexibility, I only earned income based on my time and output. There was no safety net. And my time was totally consumed by hospital and doctor visits on the one hand, and an increasingly unilateral role in the raising of our three children on the other.

When it finally appeared that my wife’s cancer had gone into remission, I quickly got a “real job” as a development officer at special education school. The pay was less than I had earned previously, but it enabled me to work out viable payment arrangements with the hospital as well as a handful of creditors who had been “bumped” because of our pressing healthcare priorities.

An insurance package was also included in my compensation, although we also kept our original insurance for my wife as an extra precaution. This, as it turns out, was a mistake. When her cancer returned a year later, both insurance companies refused to pay because they considered the other company to be her “primary carrier.”

This not only resulted in huge amounts of frustration for me—at a time when more frustration was clearly not welcome—but it also created considerable ill will among medical office accountants trying to get their money. (“But you are ultimately responsible,” I was told time and again.) Unfortunately, this situation did not get resolved until after my wife’s death. And even then, the newly minted “primary carrier” balked at paying because the window for submitting claims had been surpassed.

Without question, the emotional and physical tolls that cancer took on our family were immeasurable. And any financial hardships we endured certainly paled in comparison. But the financial challenges we faced were not negligible, and they made an almost intolerable life challenge all the more difficult.

Final Editor"s Note: The staff at cancerpage.com is extremely thankful to Richard for writing his first person account of a time in his life that was most harrowing. We hope this revealing story is a help to you and your family.