It has been awhile since we last chatted about health insurance in this country. Abide me while we do so this morning.

This is a bit of a personal story, you see, as I have known Kama since she was a teenager. I have no doubt, though, that her situation is little different from thousands of other young adults and their families.

In telling it, I will resort to no bar graphs, cost-of-care charts or jingoistic mumbo jumbo about whether reform will allow the odd out-of-stater or illegal immigrant to clog the health care system on our dime.

No, this is just a simple, if potentially lethal, tale of a young woman who made a basic personal finance decision with no safety net, a choice that now threatens her very life.

She is 26, Kama Winter is, a beautiful young woman still possessing those stunningly deep, sky blue eyes and ever-present smile.

She works as a public relations and marketing specialist for a downtown Denver nightspot.

She took the job last December after working for more than a year in marketing at a country club, a job that offered health care, which she signed up to take.

She never needed it, though, the plan skimming nearly a third of her $800 biweekly pay. So when her current job offered a medical plan, she declined, saving $200 per paycheck.

"Yes, I rolled the dice," Kama Winter now says.

She first noticed the lump in early May. A nurse she knew at Planned Parenthood directed her to a clinic that would see her and charge her based on her income.

Breast cancer, the physicians there almost immediately diagnosed.

Kama Winter was scared to death. Cancer was a family trait. Yet at the same time, a breast cancer foundation told her it would pay the cost of her treatment.

Other tests were needed, though. Scans and biopsies of every stripe were taken.

Oops. She did not have breast cancer.

Rather, she was told, she had an osteosarcoma bone tumor on her chest wall, a nasty cancerous growth attached to her fourth rib. It was about the size of an orange. That changed everything.

Since it was not breast cancer, the foundation money and the doctors disappeared virtually overnight, she said.

"I was devastated," Kama Winter said. "I did ask them if they had a chest cancer grant."

The foundation, after some negotiation, did agree to pay for all but $900 of her hospital stay. But she would need to make arrangements to pay for the team of surgeons needed.

She will need a thoracic, orthopedic and plastic surgeon to save her life, and, of course, an anesthesiologist.

"It has been nerve-racking, the not knowing," Kama Winter said, seated on the sofa in the living room of her downtown apartment, snuggling her 3-year-old dog, Chewy, tight to her chest.

"When I had health insurance, I never used it. And when I got the new job, I figured why waste the money? I turned it down. I was always healthy."

In recent days, she has made the rounds of financial advisers at various hospitals. One made her apply for Medicaid. Since she makes slightly more than $30,000 annually, she was turned down.

They instead gave her a list of foundations that might help. Kama Winter has filled out applications to all of them.

Today, she waits.

The team of surgeons will put her under the knife, she has been assured.The young woman, who had whittled her personal debt down to a few still-outstanding college loans, figures her bill, once post-surgery chemotherapy, radiation and assorted other costs are factored in, will be, conservatively, well over $200,000.

"What would you do?" Kama Winter asked. "I will have no choice."

Last Thursday night, nearly 100 friends crammed into the Purple Martini, the downtown spot where she works, for a fundraiser to at least help pay her rent for the 10 weeks she will need for recovery from surgery.

Surgeons have told her they will cut out the now-grapefruit-sized tumor from her chest plate, replacing it with bone removed from her hip. They have told her they will likely get all of the cancer on the first try.

"It has been such a roller coaster," Kama Winter said. "I am so scared. The tumor has doubled in size in the time I have waited.

"And I'm trying as much as I can to prepare for all of this. At times, I'm OK with it. Other times, I am just a wreck.

"I worry the most about my mom. She doesn't have the money to help me. But she has worked so hard to take the fear from me. She's my best friend, you know. And I worry every day that if things don't go OK, what that would do to her.

"Me, I just want this out of me. It scares me so much."

I will say this again: Here, in what most of us call the greatest country ever to grace the face of the Earth, Kama Winter should not still be sitting in her apartment with a death bomb ticking inside of her chest.

We can and should do way better than this.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-2763

Back to Top