Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

by Kate Bowler

Before I can find out whether I’ll make it into the trial, however, I need to get my medical insurance to cover it. About an hour after I hear the news I begin to work the phones, slowly making my way through all the customer service representatives in the Emory and Duke insurance systems. Each university has a chain of people accustomed to saying no or, as I am beginning to suspect, they are evil robots masquerading as humans programmed to decline your every reasonable request. I try everything. My premium insurance will not cover anything outside of the Duke hospital system. I’m too poor to pay for it myself, but I don’t qualify for charity care because I am not American. No matter how I parse it, paying as I go until I can get new insurance in January, just two months away, will cost me upward of $100,000. I know because I have had them price out the treatment down to every needle and scan. By midafternoon, there is no one left to call, and the trial is not going to consider me without promise of payment. Either I have to come up with an impossible sum of money in the next few weeks or I will never get into the trial, and all my hopes built on magic cancer disappear into the ether. I slam down the phone at the end of the last call, blood boiling. I turn toward my parents. They have been staying with me since the surgery, trying to entertain Zach, keep the refrigerator full, and take me to my hospital visits. “Don’t worry,” says my dad, putting down his book. “Your mothe...

That's not cancer, that's the private healthcare system.