I’ve had both cancer & iPhones. Cancer cost me 93 iPhones. That was with the best health insurance that self-employed, healthy, successful people could buy before the ACA.
My health savings account and high deductible health plan covered the first 36 hours of cancer treatment*. After that I was a charity case, for the cost of an additional 41 iPhones.
When I was diagnosed with a rare disease that required very expensive and immediate treatment — to avoid losing my vision or my life or both — I had the best kind of individual plan available: a fully-funded health savings account, backed by a health plan that had low premiums and a deductible of less than I had saved. Before Obamacare, that was the best-case setup for a surprise diagnosis with a serious illness.
Cancer still made my family the recipients of charity care and donated airline miles. Like having a child, the answer to ‘how much does it cost to get really sick?’ is ‘how much do you have?’
One iPhone would cover the cost of 3 months of premiums, not deductibles or cost sharing or travel to a qualified health center.*
Because of Obamacare, my health insurer offered me another year of coverage at a premium rated by my age and ZIP code, not my health. They were not allowed to exclude care for the life-threatening disease I already had until I survived a waiting period, or raise my premium to 3 times my mortgage, or dig through my past to determine whether I knew or could have known that I had this disease before I first paid them a premium. (I didn’t know cancer of the eyeball existed before I was diagnosed with it, but this was a common tactic with so-called ‘lifestyle diseases’ and some forms of cancer before the ACA — “you forgot to put your acne treatment from your pediatrician on the application? your insurance was issued fraudulently, no more coverage, we keep the premiums” was common when healthy young people got sick against the odds.)
Because of the ACA, cancer only cost me all I had at the time…it didn’t also cost my family’s home, our credit, and all our business assets. Going without an iPhone would have meant no FaceTime with my child while I was in treatment, though.
*I’m counting travel to Philadelphia, PA, from my home in New Mexico as a cost of having this cancer. There is no one qualified to treat me any closer. I have a very rare disease (1 in 1,001,000 Americans is diagnosed each year), but travel is commonly a cost of getting good care for those of us who live in areas like NM-1 and UT-3. Because lower insured rates damage the business case for opening a complex care center in any geography, serious and unusual illnesses often require travel for the patient from a state or region with more uninsured people — even for those lucky enough to have good insurance.
