By Matthew Zachary with Jen Singer
I survived brain cancer in the '90s. Here's how the Affordable Care Act could have helped me and my family
The moment you're diagnosed with cancer in the U.S., you face a financial reality that patients in other wealthy nations often don't.
In 1996, my parents, both schoolteachers, spent upward of $50,000 of their own money to keep me alive. That's about $100,000 today. I was diagnosed at 21 years old with medulloblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer that can turn deadly within months. I had surgery to remove the tumor and then radiation treatments to make sure it didn't come back.
But my family's health insurance, supplied by their labor union, wouldn't cover care at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, where I had 33 radiation treatments. The catastrophic health insurance plan my father took out for me to get care at MSK only covered a portion of the cost - $285 of the $1,650 it cost each time I got radiation.
