Three months after our son was born, my wife Catherine discovered that the painful swelling on her leg was a cancerous tumor, a sarcoma. Over the next two years, she endured 13 different operations and many months in a hospital bed, separated from me and our growing child, in the ultimately losing battle to save her leg. Throughout this ordeal, her struggle was as much with the insurance company as it was with the cancer, as they ducked and weaved to avoid paying for necessary treatments--for example, balking at paying for a rod to be implanted in her brittle irradiated femur when it suddenly broke, because the procedure had not been approved in advance.

Once the leg was finally gone, my wife worked hard to create a new normal for herself. As a rare "hip-dis" amputee (she'd lost her entire leg to the hip) the mechanical prosthetic leg available to her was uncomfortable and difficult to use. She frequently fell, hard, and eventually resigned herself to using crutches only, though it soon became clear that this had serious consequences for her wrists, shoulders and spine. Then she learned of an innovative computerized prosthetic knee that would nearly eliminate these falls. But the insurance company refused to pay for it, claiming it was "experimental and untested," willfully ignoring the fact that these devices were routinely restoring mobility to the numerous military amputees returning from Iraq. In the course of attempting to appeal the insurance company's ruling, Catherine once had an phone conversation with an increasingly hostile representative who threatened to deliberately lose her file. Fortunately, a family member was able to pay for the leg, and Catherine is now able to walk.

There are many cautionary lessons here about medical care in America. The cost of this crisis was too high, in part because we had a surgical oncologist who saw his patients not as suffering people but as intriguing opportunities to test his skills. But for rare cancers of this sort, "choice of doctors" is beside the point, and when someone tells you he can save your leg, who would turn away? Alongside of him, the insurance company did its best in the midst of all the stress to keep things complicated and confusing.

But the primary lesson I take away from our crisis was how we came to understand that we were not customers with legitimate claims to service, but impediments to the insurance company's bottom line. It is difficult to see how an industry preoccupied with profits will have the patient's best interests in mind. And we were in as good a position as almost anyone to reap the benefits of our health "plan." We were lucky, living in Southern California, to have access to major regional medical centers. As employees of the University of California, we had "good" insurance. As a PhD., Catherine is articulate, well-educated, disciplined, and smart, and she needed every bit of that to navigate the hazards of her illness and manage her own care. During her chemotherapy, I spent many hours with her in the doctor's office talking with other cancer patients, and the stories I heard about the difficulties they had getting treatment were appalling, with all the postponements and delay quite possibly fatal. How would a less educated, less forceful person have been able to fight? How would a sick single mother, or an elderly widower, have found the strength, resources, and clarity to fight for their proper care?

Our health system, with all its marvels and advances, has a deep and insidious flaw. As citizens of a vast and diverse country, with many different and competing claims on our nation's resources, we may not have an absolute right to the best of all possible medical care. But no business should base its profits on people suffering and in pain.