An article was published on Time Magazine's website recently - here's the beginning...and a link to the rest of the article is below.

For families affected by cancer, the phone number is easy to remember: 1-800-ACS-2345. The letters stand for the American Cancer Society, and dialing the number takes you to the ACS's National Cancer Information Center in Austin, Texas. The call center fields about a million calls a year, offering answers questions both simple and complex, from "Where can I get help with transportation when I can't drive to chemo appointments?" to "How do I find insurance if my illness forces me to quit my job?"

Half the calls coming into the center deal with paying for treatment, either because lifetime limits on policies are quickly reached — cancer is one of the five most costly medical conditions in the U.S., according to the ACS — or because the patient is struggling to maintain coverage in the face of rising premiums and accumulating co-pay costs. Some, having been forced by illness to stop working, must struggle to keep their employer-sponsored coverage through COBRA rules. Others are looking for access to sometimes pricey state-funded high-risk pools, and 72% of the callers are simply uninsured. So intense and complex is the insurance issue that in 2004 the ACS launched the Health Insurance Assistance Service (HIAS) within the call-center operations. Made up of a small group of specialists, the HIAS fields questions about insurance, both private and state, and helps patients navigate the system.

For the rest of the article, click here.

If you or someone you know has benefitted from calling 1-800-ACS-2345, please share your story by adding a comment to this forum.