Simone Celia Klein interviews Dr. Phyllis Klein and cancer survivor - Jovan Rodriguez.  The LA Times wrote a great article about Jovan and his struggles with being uninsured.   Be sure to watch Jovan brave a new world and share his struggles on www.thelatestwith.com 

by: steve.lopez@latimes.com

At 22, Jovan Rodriguez was carefree, fit, employed but uninsured. So the diagnosis of Hodgkin’s lymphoma came as a shock, and the ensuing bureaucratic nightmare rages on years later.

Jovan Rodriguez, an Orange County supermarket clerk, awoke one day with a stiff neck. He got up to go to the bathroom, felt kind of lousy and went back to bed.

When he woke up again, the neck was throbbing. Rodriguez looked in the mirror and did a double take. Knobbing up on the right side of his neck was a bubble the size of a golf ball.

But the lump was growing by the hour, quickly expanding to nearly the size of a tennis ball. He had to see a doctor, but was uninsured. In fact, he’d never had insurance. He hadn’t been working long enough at Albertson’s to qualify, and his mother, who managed property for a real estate company, couldn’t afford a healthcare plan.

So Rodriguez paid cash when he went to see a doctor, who suspected the lump was caused by an infection, food poisoning or an allergic reaction. But after two rounds of tests, at a cost of about $2,000, most of it on his mother’s credit card, Rodriguez got a diagnosis he couldn’t believe.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/12/local/la-me-lopezcolumn-20100512