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Medical Bills Bankrupt Many Americans

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.

Leslie and Jim Elder

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.

The Elders are broke and on the cusp of bankruptcy because of medical bills, and they’re not alone. A study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Medicine found that in 2007, 62 percent of personal bankruptcies were because of medical debts. The same study indicated that in 1981, only 8 percent of bankruptcy filings could be traced to medical bills.

The Elders boil it down to health insurance companies putting profits ahead of human life.

The Elders did not always have such a contentious relationship with their health insurance carrier, and they were not always broke. In fact, before their insurance troubles, they were solidly middle-class business owners.

However, in 1988, things began changing. It was the year of Elder’s first breast cancer diagnosis. When the family’s plan required payment of a $250 deductible and a 20 percent share of the costs of medical care, the Elders could afford it.

Years after that first diagnosis, things started getting shaky. Jim Elder says the premiums crept up slowly at first and then more dramatically.

“You do ask why, why, why,” Jim Elder said. “Why are we stuck with all these huge bills when we’re supposedly covered?”