Medical bills: Ever tried to understand one?

It seems the dialogue has begun and the ground swell is well underway to insert some sanity -- forcefully if necessary -- into the American Health care system. Whether or not they have the spine to speaking out in favor of Universal Health Care, there aren't many people around anymore who will claim the system is fine and we don't need to touch it.

A glaring case in point came across my googly reader today.

A while back I wrote a little about a tenacious family of Claytonites who had experienced catastrophic illness and the crushing financial hammer that resulted -- even though they had good insurance. All of us know someone who's dealt with the stress and the fight of a catastrophic illness. It may be a distant Uncle or a dear friend or a parent or a child or a neighbor.

This part of their struggle, however -- the billing and the extreme financial burden -- is not a part of their journey many of us see. Folks just don't talk much about how much the last bill was and how much of it is their responsibility. So this is the part of catastrophic illness we really don't "get" until we're smack in the middle of it; feeling the giant millstone for ourselves. I'm hoping that might start to change a little today. Sometimes the best medicine for a private battle is to know you're not in it alone.

Jane Hamsher, one of the founders of www.firedoglake.com has been going through an excercise of parsing her medical bills online. Jane has breast cancer. I think this is her third bout with it. That feels pretty frakkin scary by itself to me, but it seems like the biggest monster in her life at the moment is not the runaway cells in her body, but the medical bills that come from her fight against them. Here is her most recent post on the gorey details.