Victimized by the coverage gap

Daskus applied for permanent disability from the Social Security Administration. He'd been paying into Social Security since he started working. If approved, disability pay would be $1,300 a month, he said, enough to squeak by.

He was denied.

This burned him up.

"I was denied because their doctors felt I should be able to return to work by July [a year after his diagnosis], without even giving me an examination," he said in late summer. "But of course it's already August and I still haven't returned to work. I've got all these side effects from chemo - neuropathy in my hands, compression fractures in my spine, osteoporosis."

According to the Social Security Web site, a person with Hodgkin's disease can qualify for disability if he still isn't cancer-free a year later.

Daskus's chemotherapy, however, appeared to work, and in June, he was told he was in remission - the cancer was no longer detectable.

Doctors still wanted him to go for radiation, to shrink that mass in his chest, but Daskus delayed going for months, he said, because he couldn't afford gas for his wife's car to get to treatment 20 miles away.

He's supposed to start radiation next week because the oncologist, he said, arranged for a van to take him there and back.

Daskus's debt is now about $27,000, he said as he spread bills all over his coffee table. A big chunk of his debt, he said, is from penalties and soaring interest rates.

Daskus is appealing his denial for disability - and said his lawyer told him he must wait a year for a hearing. If he is granted disability coverage, he'll face another catch-22 that hundreds of thousands of Americans confront every year:

If he does receive $1,300 a month in disability payments, he'll earn too much money to qualify any longer for Medical Assistance, and he'll lose medical coverage.

Daskus will need many more tests and treatments and must have insurance to pay for them. Yet with his preexisting cancer and its side effects, he said, he believes he will never be able to afford private insurance himself.

"I may as well wither up and die," he said. "In a year's time, if I can't work, and without any income, I'll lose the house and be in the street.

"And if I do get disability, I'll lose my health insurance. It shouldn't be that way."

Daskus had never paid much attention to politics or the nation's problems.

Cancer and poverty changed his outlook. He's registered to vote for the first time - as an independent.

He is furious with the way things are.

"I'm mad because my tax dollars go to bail out an investment bank because too many millionaires were losing money, but I can't get help from a system that I had paid into my entire working life," he said.

"It's time to change the system."

Contact staff writer Michael Vitez at 215-854-5639 or mvitez@phillynews.com.