09/09/2026
9/9/26🎗️Another ugly side of childhood cancer that nobody prepares you for: you don’t just fight cancer. You fight insurance, too.
In less than four months, Peyton had 174 insurance claims totaling $1,837,024.58 billed to insurance. Let that sink in for a second. Nearly $1.84 MILLION DOLLARS with 174 individualize claims!!! Obviously, I am incredibly thankful we have insurance. But having insurance does not mean you can just hand over your card and focus on keeping your child alive. I wish it were that simple. Instead, somewhere between chemotherapy, surgeries, scans, labs, hospital stays, medications, traveling for care, working, and trying to keep some sense of normalcy for our family, I basically had to take on another unpaid job: learning how to navigate our health insurance system. My biggest advice to any family going through something medically complex: ‼️‼️CALL YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY AND REQUEST A CASE MANAGER ASAP‼️‼️
Our case eventually became complicated enough that we had two incredible women helping me navigate it. They worked endlessly behind the scenes, and I genuinely don’t know what I would have done without them. But even with their help, the amount of work that still fell on me was ridiculous. Hours on the phone, tracking claims, reading EOBs, checking authorizations, making sure providers were in network, comparing bills to insurance claims, documenting phone calls, disputing charges. Following up again…and again…and again. I work hard for our family to have good insurance coverage and what insurance put us through this year is a disgrace. All while taking care of our child with cancer.🤬
Within 24 hours of Peyton’s diagnosis, I knew we had already hit her deductible and out-of-pocket maximum. Yet bills continued pouring into our mailbox like wildfire. And then came the fun part: trying to figure out which ones we actually owed. Was insurance still processing it? Was it applied correctly? Did it count toward our out-of-pocket maximum? Was the provider billing us prematurely? Was it something we were actually responsible for? And when I didn’t immediately pay bills I believed were still being worked through insurance? Collection letters started showing up just as fast. So then, on top of everything else, I was sending dispute letters almost weekly.
Recently, I finally asked our case managers to make me an Excel sheet showing exactly which claims out of the 174 we were actually responsible for paying because I couldn’t keep up with everything. And bless their hearts that they did. 🙌🫶🏻
Because I refuse to blindly pay every medical bill that lands in my mailbox simply because someone printed an amount next to “Amount Due.” I will pay every dollar we legitimately owe. But I will not pay one dollar more. Parents should be spending those hours holding their children—not fighting a healthcare system on the phone. But until that changes, LEARN your policy and ADVOCATE like hell. Because nobody will protect your family, your child’s care, or your bank account quite like you will. 🎗️💛💪
