When staying alive means going bankrupt

Mike Stuckey Senior news editor • Profile

LOMPOC, Calif. - Kathleen Aldrich, financially ruined by two bouts with ovarian cancer, is not who you might assume she is.

She raised three kids as a single mom. She worked hard for years. She had good jobs. She paid her bills. She lived in a nice house and drove a nice car. She had a decent credit rating. She had health insurance.

Now she has a record of bankruptcy and is the embodiment of the fear that nags at millions of U.S. families: that they are but one medical calamity away from losing everything. Like Aldrich, they — and perhaps you — could be.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Aldrich says thoughtfully, sitting in the neat, pale green living room of her tiny stucco duplex in the middle of this mostly middle-class American town. “I don’t see that I did.”

Just turned 50, tall and blond with a quick smile, Aldrich is gratefully in remission for a second time from the ovarian cancer, the No. 5 cancer killer of women. Despite “feeling like a little black cloud follows me around all the time,” she has a lot to live for, from a budding long-distance romance to a precocious 6-year-old granddaughter named Alyssa.

A cat named Jack and a great boss
She has a friendly Maine coon cat named Jack, a boss she adores and a grassy park nearby where she can stroll for miles as the long summer evenings unwind in Lompoc, a flat checkerboard between the bumpy brown California hills to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. The town, best known for a federal lockup that has housed the likes of junk bond king Michael Milken and Nixon confidant H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, also is home to Vandenberg Air Force Base, diatomaceous earth mines and 42,000 residents.

INTERACTIVE Fact file Health care & costs, by the numbers

But her life is hardly idyllic. Two years and four months after her second trip through the hell of chemotherapy, Aldrich is embarking on the painful new journey of trying to rebuild her life and her credit rating. The bankruptcy has quashed all thoughts that she might someday retire. More immediately, it has left her unable to obtain thousands of dollars of work on her teeth, which likely were weakened by the powerful anti-cancer drugs.

And it has left deeper wounds of shame and guilt over having to walk away from unpaid bills after a lifetime of responsible living.

Aldrich’s situation is "asinine" but increasingly common, said Dr. Deborah Thorne of Ohio University. Thorne, co-author of a widely quoted 2005 study that found medical bills contributed to nearly half of the 1.5 million personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. each year, said that ratio has likely worsened since the data was gathered.

Bankruptcy in the light of large medical bills is “unfortunately the only choice many people have," she said. "They will never in their lifetimes pay them off.

“To talk with these people again and again is so frustrating. They’re such thoughtful, kind folks who are being set up by the system we have now. What’s most appalling is they’re ashamed.”

Like Aldrich, Thorne said, three-quarters of the individuals in the study who declared bankruptcy because of health problems were insured.

"When the illness began ... they were floored," she said. "They assumed incorrectly that if you have health insurance that you’re fine and that you’ll get the treatment that you’ll need and not have to mortgage the farm to pay for it.”

In the beginning, that assumption appeared accurate to Aldrich.

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