Thursday, August 10, 2017

Widowed Early, A Cancer Doctor Writes About The Harm Of Medical Debt

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.
Today, she's a radiation oncologist at Duke University, studying the effects of financial strain on cancer patients. And she's a widow.

How she got from there to here is a story about how health care and money are intertwined in ways that doctors and patients don't like to talk about.
But Chino is determined to do so.
"I think of him every day," Chino says of her late husband, Andrew Ladd. "It drives me to do the type of research that I do — that's looking at the financial toxicity of cancer care."
Chino is co-author of a research letter, published Thursday 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.

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