Some people seem surprised and confused, or just not believing, when hearing how having cancer in the family can completely screw up your finances. Calculate this….

Donna’s lung cancer treatment starts next week. The cost per session will be somewhere around $8,000 per session (if it’s anything like the chemo she had for breast cancer - and assuming that prices haven’t gone up). She will have 6 groups of 3 sessions over the term of the treatment. That’s $144,000.

Of course, nearly everyone has some kind of insurance. So let’s see, for a typical 80/20 insurance plan, that means that the person with cancer would be paying $28,800 out of their pocket… plus any deductible amount before the insurance kicks in.

But our insurance is not a typical “I’m employed at a big company that pays for a large part of my premiums” 80/20 plan, it’s a “typical” self employed insurance plan, with 70/30 coverage…. and a $7500 deductible. So, that means of this $144,000 cost of treatment, $48,450 will have to be covered out of our pocket.

Keeping in mind, that for the breast cancer several years ago, there also were 3 surgeries and several months of daily radiation treatments.

So, as you see, there is a reason that a large percentage of people who have cancer in the family either end up loosing everything or filing for bankruptcy.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Cancer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.