Doc Survived, Uninsured Patient Didn't

Dr. Perry Klaassen is pictured in his office in Oklahoma City, in a Thursday, March 8, 2007 photo. Dr. Klaassen lived to tell about his frightening ordeal with colon cancer. His patient did not. They were the same age, in the same state, suffering from the same disease. But there was one huge difference: Klaassen had health insurance, his patient did not.(AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki) (Sue Ogrocki - AP)

An estimated 112,000 Americans with cancer have no health insurance, according to Physicians for a National Health Program.

And that's only cancer. Among the 45 million Americans who have no health insurance, there are countless people with chronic and developing health problems who are risking the same kind of fate that took Shirley Searcy's life.

Klaassen's essay in the Journal of the American Medical Association illustrates the issue "right there up close and personal," said editor Dr. Catherine DeAngelis.

It underscores that insurance can be a life or death issue, said Paul Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan policy research organization. "The cost of health insurance has been going up faster than people's incomes," he said.

U.S. spending on health care totaled $2 trillion last year and economists in February projected it will nearly double by 2016.

Said DeAngelis: "We have the richest country in the world and I think the poorest health delivery system in the developed world. It's really sad."

Klaassen, now 67, no longer sees patients but works part-time as medical director of an Oklahoma City group that recruits doctors to give free care to needy patients.

Always healthy and vigorous, his diagnosis in 2001 came as a shock.

He went to his family physician after experiencing an annoying pain in his lower abdomen for a few weeks. A CT scan showed possible inflammation, but his doctor recommended a colonoscopy, the gold-standard test for detecting colon cancer.

Klaassen had the test within two weeks. When the specialist ready with the results asked, "Is your wife with you?" Klaassen wrote, "I knew immediately that I had colon cancer."

His wife was out of town, and needing someone to share the awful news with, he turned to a physician friend "and I broke down and cried."

Surgery two days later showed the disease had spread outside the colon wall and to nearby lymph nodes. It was not quite as advanced as Mrs. Searcy's, whose disease had spread to the liver.