Falling Through
Casualties of the Health Insurance Crisis
Facing a chronic illness with no insurance
A barber with a chronic disease falls deeper into dept.
Marty Grassia owns Pete's Barber Shop in the small town of Mantua in Gloucester County. It's a soothing but busy shop with three art-deco barber chairs and Sinatra crooning all day.
Marty is married, with children ages 9, 7, and 6, and a Labrador retriever, Zoe.
It could be a Norman Rockwell picture of what's right about America.
Until you get to health care.
Grassia, 36, has Crohn's disease, a chronic and painful inflammation of the intestines that can lead to life-threatening complications.
He says he can't afford insurance for his wife and himself. He spent $40,000 on medical care in the last year, wiping out his savings.
He still owes $20,000 in medical bills. The interest each month on his credit card, he said, is $400.
"That's a lot of haircuts," he says.
From September to May, he spent 30 days in Underwood-Memorial Hospital in Woodbury and missed 60 days of work.
"My credit card is pushed to the max," he says. "My savings are depleted. I'm at the breaking point."
He's been feeling better lately, but adds: "I'm basically living week to week. If I get sick again, I don't know what will happen."
His children, at least, are covered through New Jersey FamilyCare, a program for working families.
"It's a godsend," he says of that program, although his income is too high for him and his wife, Debrah, to qualify. "Without it, I'd probably be living with my mother."
Grassia started at the barbershop in 1996, and felt at home right away. After six months, then-owner Pete Scaffidi told him, "You're going to own this place one day."
The same year he started working at the shop, he got married, and he had insurance through his wife's job at a bank. But in 1998, pregnant, she quit her job. The couple paid $350 a month to continue her minimal insurance for a few years to cover the deliveries.
Grassia let his own coverage lapse, figuring he wouldn't need it. Six months later, he was diagnosed with Crohn's. "I just had constant stomach problems and indigestion," he recalls. "Eat, and within five minutes I was in the bathroom."
He managed the illness until 2001 when it flared up again, resulting in costly treatments and surgery to remove 12 inches of his intestines. It exhausted his savings.
When he felt better, he looked to buy insurance, but couldn't find anything affordable.
The cheapest he was able to find, he said, cost him $1,000 a month only for himself, and that covered only 50 percent of his medications.
"The cost of insurance is astronomical," he says, "and so is the cost of getting sick. I play a game: How long can I stay well?"
