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)

Karen said they had no health insurance when the first two of their four children were born. They needed help to pay for the births.

Now they're covered through Kenneth's job as a plywood salesman _ a godsend since he has diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol and co-payments alone for his medicine have totaled $90 a month.

"There's a lot of mixed emotions about health care in my mind," Kenneth Searcy said. "You really can't afford it, but you can't afford not to have it."

With insurance, Mrs. Searcy would have sought treatment sooner, family members said.

"I believe with all my heart that if she had gone to a doctor early on, that she would still be living," Karen Searcy said.

She said her mother-in-law held up pretty well after her surgery in January 2003. But by that Thanksgiving, when she could no longer make her holiday pies, the gravity of her situation finally hit her.

"She broke down and cried and she realized that her strength was gone," her daughter-in-law said.

Shirley Searcy died a month later.

Klaassen last saw his patient several months before her death, but kept in touch by phone, and her children said that was a comfort to her.

"Shirley spoke very highly of him," Karen Searcy said. "He was not just a doctor, he was a friend. Their situations being the same, I'm sure created a bond between them."

Klaassen also thinks things would have turned out differently for Mrs. Searcy if she'd been insured.

"If she had survived at least a year more, she would have had new pills available to her," the same ones that have helped control his disease, Klaassen said.

"People think that everybody's taken care of, that there's a safety net," he said.

"People say ... nobody ever dies because they don't have insurance, and I say, 'Yeah, they do.'"

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