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Comment by zawerf | Hacker News Reader

I think that's just a corollary of "63% Of Americans Don't Have Enough Savings To Cover A $500 Emergency":

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maggiemcgrath/2016/01/06/63-of-...

EDIT: My comment is in reference to the old thread title, which was something like "More than 42 percent of the 9.5 million people diagnosed with cancer from 2000 to 2012 drained their life's assets within two years"

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Not with cancer. I know people who had cancer and there was a never ending inflow of bills for 5000 here, 10000 there until they were wiped out. Add to that the fact it’s very hard to fight your insurance while you are very sick.

Even with insurance, folks often wind up with six figures of bills out of pocket treating cancer. That's a huge amount for the even most frugal of the lower or middle class.

When my son was born he fit in my hand and spent his first three months in NICU. I guess the nurses thought his survival was questionable so they entered in his name into the computer as “Baby Boy”. A few months later I started getting bills (eventually around $3 million) because there was nobody named “Baby Boy” on my insurance. Calling the insurance to try and correct was a nightmare - wait on hold for an hour, get 3rd degree interrogation about my identity, wait on hold, explain that son was on insurance but not called literally “Baby Boy”, wait on hold, get interrogated for his details on son’s identity, wait on hold, long series of questions to determine Baby Boy isn’t real and let me know about penalties for fraud. Three hours later done, that covers the first $50. Decided I would never do that again, let it go to collections and explain it to the judge. Turns out that before it goes to collections it goes to someone with a brain who realizes “Baby Boy” is in-fact the infant boy with identical birth date on my policy, notices stop coming. No telling how much money they spent sending me all the nasty payment due letters in the mean time.

As someone who works in healthcare software, I wouldn't interpret "Baby Boy" that way. Different hospitals process information in different ways and it is very common for newborns to all be entered under the same, generic name. Sometimes different departments within the same hospital have different systems, especially as they get more specialized (see: NICU). Maybe the birth name you chose got entered in one place and not the other.

Just thought I'd shed some light on the issue.

I wonder what percentage of insurance companies' profits are from fraudulent collection attempts like this.

That was my initial thought, and it's definitely related, but the term used here is assets which people generally have a lot more of then just raw cash savings.

The abstract to the paywalled study cites the average expenditure being about $92k per person in the study. While it is still ridiculous that people should have to pay that much to fight off an illness, that is a disturbingly low value for an "entire life's assets", particularly considering the study was restricted to people who are 50 or older (with an average age of 68.6).

cancer treatments in USA are several orders of magnitude more expensive than $500. I know a breast cancer survivor with $100k of medical debt.

Let's see, since starting treatment in October, even with awesome healthcare we've spent over $5k in treatment. I absolutely believe the $100K statement as I've seen what the insurance pays.

Certainly, but the person in the article was a woman with enough savings that she had planned to retire early.

If it can hit her that hard, it would be devastating to someone without $500.

Not really, if you don't have money you likely don't have insurance and you are moved to hospice care. Maybe you can get a round of palliative chemo when tumor burden is high enough to cause symptoms (shortness of breath, gastric outlet obstruction, liver dysfunction, etc). So it's less of a financial devastation and more of a life ending diagnosis.

If you have money and insurance then a hospital and insurance company will gladly work together to take what money you do have. Sort of like a chicken wishbone.

None of the surveys linked in this article go over age distribution of savings -- something I'd expect to be inversely proportional to incidences of cancer.

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