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Rally against medical insurers cites Frankfort man's plight
January 16, 2008
By William Lee, Staff writer

Using the Rev. Martin Luther King's fight for equality as a jumping-off point on what would've been his 79th birthday, members of a nurses' union staged a rally Tuesday in downtown Chicago decrying corporate interference in health care.

The rally organized by the National Nurses Organizing Committee and the California Nurses Association outside of Cigna health care's offices in the 500 block of West Monroe Street featured a Southland mother and daughter waging a battle against the insurance industry.

"While my dad fights, UniCare has failed him, and it has failed my family," Jody Polka told two dozen demonstrators on the frigid afternoon.

Polka's father, Cyril Strezo, 58, of Frankfort, suffers from esophageal cancer that was initially treated with radiation and chemotherapy. When the cancer spread to his liver last fall, his oncologist prescribed two drugs for his treatment.
UniCare declined to pay the cost of the drugs - about $3,000 per week - calling them "experimental and/or investigative," despite the drugs having been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in the 1990s.

But a recent article in the SouthtownStar spurred state Rep. Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) and the Illinois attorney general's office to bring pressure on UniCare, resulting in the insurer reversing its decision and agreeing to cover the cost of Strezo's drugs....

http://www.southtownstar.com/news/74...hrally.article