Clinic: Ohio woman can keep her home

March 17, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

A woman championed as the Obama administration’s emblem for health-care reform does not have to choose between her home and her health, according to officials at the Ohio hospital where she is being treated.

With a self-reported annual income of about $6,000, Natoma Canfield is a prime candidate for financial aid in the form of Medicaid — the federal health-care program for low- income and disabled people — or charitable assistance.

And the Cleveland Clinic said it has no intention of putting out a lien on Canfield’s house — or letting the billing process interfere with her treatment.

“It appears that I think she’ll be fine,” said Lyman Sornberger, the hospital’s executive director of patient financial services. “By nature of the fact that she was not early on rejected by either program, that’s a key indicator that she will most likely be eligible.”

Canfield was stunned last month when she unsealed a handwritten letter from the president. She had written to Obama before the holidays to request that he count her as a “statistic,” as she put it, among the scores of Americans unable to afford health insurance — but she never expected to get a response.

“I still can’t get over the thrill of opening that,” said Canfield, 50, who is undergoing chemotherapy treatments for leukemia.

Obama traveled to Northeast Ohio on Monday to champion Canfield’s plight as proof of why health-care reform is so urgently needed.

Canfield, who successfully battled breast cancer 16 years ago, collapsed last week while she was carrying a bucket of grain on a friend’s farm, where she had worked for years. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was told she had acute leukemia.

Like any patient who walks through the clinic’s doors without medical coverage, Canfield immediately was assigned an adviser to help assess whether she was eligible for financial aid, hospital officials said.