Excerpt from: USA Today (click for full article)
It is usually after the mail arrives that Della Saavedra comes undone.
That's when she sits in her living room in this Los Angeles suburb and sorts through the latest round of letters from her health plan, each rejecting her appeal to stay with her trusted oncologist at City of Hope, a cancer center.
For as long as she can remember, Saavedra, 53, a former cafeteria worker who suffers from bone marrow cancer, has been insured through Medicaid, the joint federal-state program for low-income people. For most of that time, she could go to any doctor willing to take her, but last year, the state revamped the program and assigned her to a managed care plan with a restricted network of doctors. Her oncologist is not on its roster.
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