Ten years ago, Fumiko Chino was the art director at a television production company in Houston, engaged to be married to a young Ph.D. candidate. But today she's a radiation oncologist at Duke University, studying the effects of financial strain on cancer patients, and a widow, according to an NPR feature yesterday. In 2005, Chino's husband was diagnosed with neuroendocrine carcinoma, an aggressive cancer of endocrine cells that can strike in a variety of places in the body and can be hard to treat. Soon, his medical costs surpassed his insurance policy's $500,000 lifetime limit, but the bills kept coming. Ten years after Ladd's death, Chino is still dealing with the aftereffects. "I still owe the debt," she says. "I stopped answering phone calls from debt collectors." Chino is co-author of a research letter, published yesterday in JAMA Oncology, that shows that some cancer patients, even with insurance, spend about a third of their household income on out-of-pocket health care costs outside of insurance premiums. The JAMA Oncology study shows that on average, cancer patients spend about 11 percent of their income on out-of-pocket health care costs, not including insurance premiums.
