Stage 4 Cancer Survivor Wants “Substandard Plan” Keeping Her Alive Back

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Obama Inc’s gaggle of spokesmen swarmed the airwaves on Sunday claiming that the ObamaCare health plan disaster would only affect “a small number of people” and was just taking away their “bad apple”, “scam” and “substandard plans”.

Here is the story of one woman and her substandard bad apple scam plan that she would like back.

Everyone now is clamoring about Affordable Care Act winners and losers. I am one of the losers.

My grievance is not political; all my energies are directed to enjoying life and staying alive, and I have no time for politics. For almost seven years I have fought and survived stage-4 gallbladder cancer, with a five-year survival rate of less than 2% after diagnosis. I am a determined fighter and extremely lucky. But this luck may have just run out: My affordable, lifesaving medical insurance policy has been canceled effective Dec. 31.

My choice is to get coverage through the government health exchange and lose access to my cancer doctors, or pay much more for insurance outside the exchange (the quotes average 40% to 50% more) for the privilege of starting over with an unfamiliar insurance company and impaired benefits.

But I’m sure her old plan was really bad and her new plan will be great because it will cover the 62 year-old woman’s birth control.

Two things have been essential in my fight to survive stage-4 cancer. The first are doctors and health teams in California and Texas: at the medical center of the University of California, San Diego, and its Moores Cancer Center; Stanford University’s Cancer Institute; and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

The second element essential to my fight is a United Healthcare PPO (preferred provider organization) health-insurance policy.

Since March 2007 United Healthcare has paid $1.2 million to help keep me alive, and it has never once questioned any treatment or procedure recommended by my medical team. The company pays a fair price to the doctors and hospitals, on time, and is responsive to the emergency treatment requirements of late-stage cancer. Its caring people in the claims office have been readily available to talk to me and my providers.

But then ObamaCare came along and killed her policy and the ability to see her doctors.

So if I go with a health-exchange plan, I must choose between Stanford and UCSD. Stanford has kept me alive—but UCSD has provided emergency and local treatment support during wretched periods of this disease, and it is where my primary-care doctors are.

Before the Affordable Care Act, health-insurance policies could not be sold across state lines; now policies sold on the Affordable Care Act exchanges may not be offered across county lines.

What happened to the president’s promise, “You can keep your health plan”? Or to the promise that “You can keep your doctor”? Thanks to the law, I have been forced to give up a world-class health plan. The exchange would force me to give up a world-class physician.

For a cancer patient, medical coverage is a matter of life and death. Take away people’s ability to control their medical-coverage choices and they may die. I guess that’s a highly effective way to control medical costs. Perhaps that’s the point.

If you like your life, you can keep your life.

  • Veracious_one

    Obama doesn’t care….I wonder if she voted for Obama.

  • CowboyUp

    But just think, if this lady dies early, not only does the federal government save a bunch of money they would have to pay her, they also get to pocket part of her estate. Socialists love people like her who don’t have time for politics. They’ll let such people know what they lost, by ignoring politics, in their own good time. For socialists that can and does go beyond freedom and property, to life itself.

  • frodo

    You leave out the part that her insurance company decided to leave the market in California–this is *not* the cancellation of a substandard plan. Ms Sundby’s situation is a very complicated one. Obamacare did not “kill” her insurance policy, her insurance company did.

    “.. in January, United Healthcare sent me a letter announcing that
    they were pulling out of the individual California market. The company
    suggested I look to Covered California starting in October.

    You would think it would be simple to find a health-exchange plan that
    allows me, living in San Diego, to continue to see my primary oncologist
    at Stanford University and my primary care doctors at the University of
    California, San Diego. Not so. UCSD has agreed to accept only one
    Covered California plan—a very restrictive Anthem EPO Plan. EPO stands
    for exclusive provider organization, which means the plan has a small
    network of doctors and facilities and no out-of-network coverage (as in a
    preferred-provider organization plan) except for emergencies. Stanford
    accepts an Anthem PPO plan but it is not available for purchase in San
    Diego (only Anthem HMO and EPO plans are available in San Diego).”

    • Smoking Hamster

      Yeah, it is because the other companies get huge tax breaks. Of course Obamacare raising the costs of insurance companies by forcing them to cover all sorts of extraneous things doesn’t help either.

      • frodo

        Not sure that that’s either true or relevant here. Moreover, these are business decisions, are they not? Again, this is not to discount anything about Ms Sundby’s case, only to say that this is not a representative one.

    • Erudite Mavin

      Just spoke with UCSD Moors National Cancer Institute here in San Diego.
      They also accept Medicare and United Healthcare among others.

    • Veracious_one

      EPO stands
      for exclusive provider organization, which means the plan has a small
      network of doctors and facilities and no out-of-network coverage (as in a
      preferred-provider organization plan) except for emergencies.

      This limited availability of covered doctors will hinder many people who have established relationships with doctors who are no longer covered by the plan….Doctors choose which plans they will accept….they don’t choose EPO plans because of EPO plans insufficient payment schedule….Neither the government nor the insurance companies can force the doctors to accept substandard payment schedules..patients can still use the doctors of their choice but they will have to pay out of pocket expenses…resulting in creating financial hardship on the patients….which is exactly what Obama wants for American citizens…

  • v

    If she voted for Obama, then with all my sympathies due to her disease, I won’t feel sorry for her dilema, as she was instrumental in ruining many other people’s lives, not only in healthcare, but for everything he has done to damage this once great country.

  • DogmaelJones1

    “If you like your life, you can keep your life.” But, who ever said that life or saving lives was the purpose of Obamacare? The purpose of Obamacare is to force everyone into a captive market dominated by bureaucrats and power-hustlers. Anyone who doesn’t want to be a captive, can, by Obamcare’s rules, drop dead.

  • SoCalMike

    The thieves, conmen, parasites and mentally conformed will never allow themselves to take the blame when people start dying as a result of their coercion.
    Their precious goals and beliefs are more important than real living people.
    Swine all of them. And I don’t really care if they are stupid or lying.