• October 22, 2001
• Vol. 56
• No. 17

Healthy Returns

Cancer Survivor Sarah Terry Gives Virginia Taxpayers a Way to Help the Uninsured

As she sat in a Charlottesville, Va., laboratory undergoing chemotherapy one February morning two years ago, breast-cancer patient Sarah Terry struck up a conversation with Teri Mullis, a hairdresser undergoing her first treatment. "She had that deer-in-the-headlights look, " recalls Terry, 51. "She was not insured. She'd had this lump in her breast for a year while she bounced from doctor to doctor." A few days later, Terry mentioned Mullis's plight to Ken Woodley, editor of the local Farmville Herald, and he came up with an idea: IRS forms have a donation box for contributions to presidential campaigns; why not have a similar box on state tax returns for donations to uninsured patients with grave illnesses?

Then executive director of the Farmville Area Chamber of Commerce, Terry used her political connections to lobby state legislators on behalf of the idea. Their proposal was signed into law just seven weeks later. The first measure of its kind in the country, the Uninsured Medical Catastrophe Fund has raised $40,000, and officials are now devising guidelines for doling it out. At Terry's urging, her new boss, Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode, is advocating a bill to add the box to federal returns. "I hope it helps someone from being treated like I was, " says Mullis, 47, a divorced mother of two who had a free lifesaving mastectomy at a university hospital. "Life shouldn't be based on how fat your wallet is."

For Terry, life had centered on her husband of 29 years, contractor Parker, 52, and their son Trip, 20. Then, in late 1998, doctors found a tumor in her left breast. After a lumpectomy and four rounds of chemo paid for by insurance, she reports, she's "healthy as a horse." Terry hopes her activism will let others say the same. "If it helps one person, that's great, " she says. "But I know it's going to do a lot more."