Medical bills drive many U.S. women into debt, report finds [View all]

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http://vitals.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/12/12709312-medical-bills-drive-many-us-women-into-debt-report-finds?lite&google_editors_picks=true

Eight years after she was diagnosed with breast cancer at the unusually young age of 31, Catherine Lovazzano is down to her last $10,000 of debt. “I am really looking forward to paying this off, now that I have a job with great health insurance again,” says Lovazzano, now 39 and working for Chrysler in San Francisco.

Lovazzano is part of the 26 percent of U.S. women who had trouble paying medical bills in the United States in 2009-2010, according to a report released by the non-profit Commonwealth Fund on Friday. That’s double the rate of women anywhere else surveyed -- the rate's 13 percent in Australia and just 4 percent of German women report trouble paying medical bills. But Commonwealth, which advocates for health reform, says the 2010 health reform law will slash these numbers when it starts to take full effect in 2014.

Lovazzano, like many young adult Americans, took out a no-frills health insurance plan when she left a paid job to become a freelance film producer nine years ago. She called her former employer’s insurer to continue coverage after her insurance ran out under COBRA – the law that requires employers to offer coverage to employees for a few months after they leave work. The insurer, Lovazzano said, told her she was young and healthy and needed only coverage for catastrophic events. “They basically sold me junk coverage,” Lovazzano said in a telephone interview.

Catastrophe did strike, in the form of breast cancer. But Lovazzano found out she wasn’t even close to being fully covered. “When I went into surgery they said, ‘You need to write us a check for $1,000 right now’ and I said ‘I don’t have $1,000.' I knew I was in trouble.”