It was that pain again. Rose-Marie ...

It was that pain again. Rose-Marie Shaffer popp a bond of Aleve as she had done each night for the previous week and got ready for bed. The longtime promote assumed the nagging ache in her arm was from using the computer too prolonged at work. At 11:10 that night, she realized it wasn't. As she combed her hair, the pain mov to her chest. "I woke my daughter up and said, 'I think I ne to move to the hospital. I think I'm having a heart attack,'" she recalled.

That was in 2000 Five years later, Shaffer is still paying for that two-day stay at Advocate southern Suburban Hospital. The bill came to $18800 At the time, Shaffer was the director of nursing at a west suburban residence health care agency. As a full-time employee she assumed she'd have insurance, however it turned out that she didn't.

Following the heart attack, she couldn't work for six month She was behind in her mortgage payments, and she was threatened with foreclosure. "Who do you experience to pay? Do you attempt to catch up on the mortgage in succession your house, or do you pay a hospital bill and sit gone out in the middle of the street?" Shaffer questioned. With no financial relief in sight, Shaffer did what a growing number of ill-stricken families have done: file for bankruptcy.

A newly come Harvard University study estimated that nearly half of all personal bankruptcies nationwide are to be ascribed to illness and medical bills. Illinois has the fifth-highest estimated number of of the like kind cases in the nation, with 40168 medical-related cases without of 79,777 bankruptcy filings in 2004 Those numbers bring Illinois ahead of New York, which has 65 million more residents and is estimated to have 1523 fewer medical-related cases.

"There can be no doubt that there are more families than at all times before collapsing into bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem" said Elizabeth Warren, co-author of the study

And things could learn worse, experts say. The charge of health care continues to rise, and propos federal legislation could make filing for personal bankruptcy more difficult this spring.

Now 65 Shaffer uses about 88 percent of her roughly $4300 monthly take-home pay toward her payments--$2,088 for her creditors and $1700 for her mortgage. Filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, single in kind of two types of personal bankruptcy, allowed Shaffer to withhold her home in south suburban region Club Hills while paying her creditors a reduc amount across a three-year period, which extreme points in early 2006.

When many the community her age are retiring, Shaffer works 60 hours a week as nursing director at Park House Nursing Center upon Chicago's Southwest Side. She imposes in another 16 hours forward the weekends at a nursing home

"Nobody's safe," Warren said. "I idea the people in bankruptcy because of medical riddles would be the people who live at the margins--day laborers, housemaids. if it were not that it was solid middle-class folks--people who had done everything right."

In the Harvard meditation published in February, researchers examined 1771 bankruptcy cases, including 450 in Illinois, and estimated that illness and medical bills caused nearly 46 percent of about 15 million personal bankruptcies filed nationwide.

Researchers base that single mothers with a college education were most likely to the for medical-related bankruptcy when they or their children got seriously ill. The median age was 42 "Often the mom has to take opposite to work to take care of the kids," said Dr Steffie Woolhandler, contemplation co-author and associate professor of medicine at Harvard University. "Or, equal if she doesn't, there's not enough extra income around to pay the bills of a chronically ill child."

principally of those affected nationwide--76 percent--had medical insurance. One-third of those with private insurance misspent their coverage when they couldn't work suitable to the illness. Another 56 percent of commonalty in bankruptcy owned their dwellings or had lost them.

"People take upon debt for their home or their car, assuming that they're going to be able to work," Woolhandler said. "But when an illness hits, the income situation changes, and the work situation changes. in such a manner not only are they unable to pay their medical bills, they're unable to pay other bills."

The in the greatest degree common ailments that led to bankruptcies were cardio vascular diseases, of that kind as high blood pressure, rap and heart attack, and orthopedic puzzles often from accidents. But it was cancer that hit people's pocketbook the hardest.

Cancer patients had the highest out-of-pocket medical costs at an average of $35,000--more than triple the average patient's bills.

ables say that the debt is especially difficult to pay when pay by substitutioned with other debt. "The combination of losing their piece of works at the same time, already carrying too to a great degree debt and having no savings meant that these families really didn't have a chance one time someone got sick," Warren said.

For a certain quantity of even after bankruptcy, the medical liability continues to accumulate. "If you've unraveled a chronic illness, and you're not going to be able to walk back to work, and you're living forward a social security payment, you may none be able to pay back that debt" Woolhandler said.