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Medical Emergencies Without Insurance
How to Get the Help You Need Without Going into Debt
By Teri Brown
When Kira Nunez's husband cut his finger, they both knew it was bad. But they didn't know that it would require a surgery that would impact them for the next four years. You see, the Nunezes were without medical insurance.
"He had severed a nerve and partially severed a tendon and wasn't able to use his hand," says Nunez, mother of three from St. Aurora, Colo. "He was also in a huge amount of pain because of the nerve damage. The surgery worked just fine, and although he would have benefited from physical therapy, we weren't able to afford it. So he ended up with partial feeling in his finger and almost all his range of motion back."
According to the 2000 Census by the U.S. Commerce Department, more than 14 percent of Americans in 2001 were in the same boat as the Nunezes – without health insurance. Even scarier: Almost 11 percent of children were also uninsured. So how do these families cope when they are faced with a medical emergency and major hospital bills?
Dr. Kathryn Stewart, medical director for Care Management at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Chicago, Ill., believes that how you deal with medical emergencies depends heavily on what sort of problem you have.
"If it is a short-lived medical problem, such as a broken leg, and the family is middle class – owns their own home, makes a middle-class income – then my advice is to discuss the problem with their family physician, pediatrician or internist," Dr. Stewart says. "A primary care physician is trained to be a patient advocate, but also knows their way around the health care system."
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