Time magazine's Karen Tumulty has been writing about health care since at least the early 1990s, (when I met her) so she wasn't all that worried when her mom called and said her brother's health insurer was refusing to pay his medical bills when his kidneys failed.

I told her not to worry; bureaucratic mix-up, I assumed. I said I'd take care of it, bringing to bear my 15 years of experience covering health policy, sitting through endless congressional hearings on the subject and even moderating a presidential candidates' forum on the issue.

Confident of my abilities to sort this out or at least find the right person to fix the problem, I made some calls to the company. I got nowhere. That's when I realized that the national crisis I'd written so much about had just hit home.

For six years, since the last time he got health benefits on the job, her brother, Patrick Tumulty, had been paying for his own health insurance, one six-month policy at a time on the individual market. The deductible was high though, $2,500, and he had put off routine care because he couldn't afford to self-pay on his $9-an-hour job. He is 54, and has Asperger's syndrome. "Pat," his sister writes, "can multiply three-digit numbers in his head with ease, but he has trouble accepting the unfamiliar and adjusting to the unforeseen." Kidney disease is both unfamiliar and unforeseen.

Her article pinpoints the many ways one family's crisis intersects with our nation's broken system. Patrick was paying thousands of dollars for skimpy coverage in the individual market for insurance and found that he wasn't protected when he needed to be. He had become one of the "underinsured" without even knowing it. He put off routine and preventive care, because he couldn't afford to self-pay in an anachronistic system geared toward acute care. When he finally cancelled the policy after the local kidney center payment coordinator said he's "wasting his money on premiums, and he's going to need it" he became one of the 46 million uninsured. With a pre-existing condition, a chronic disease. And not a lot of wiggle room in his personal finances. If he got so sick that he needed dialysis, he'd run through what little savings he had, and then finally maybe get some help from Medicare's End Stage Renal Disease Program. But it was harder to find ways of keeping him well enough to avoid that fate, which would be costly to him and the taxpayers. The goal, after all, was to avoid "end-stage."

But he has one tenacious (and well-informed) sister. Karen found some help for him through Bexar County, which has a program called CareLink to help low-income people get treatment rather than show up in the emergency room.  And she found out, doing the reporting on her story, that his insurer had been fined in Connecticut for practices similar to those Patrick had encountered in Texas:

I contacted the Texas Department of Insurance, identifying myself as both the sister of an aggrieved policyholder and a journalist. Officials there suggested that Pat file a complaint against the company. Each year the department receives as many as 11,000 complaints and manages to get $12 million to $13 million back for consumers, Audrey Selden, the department's consumer-protection chief, told me. "It is important to complain."

And it's easy too. It took Pat and me less than 10 minutes to fill out the complaint form over the Internet. That was Jan. 14, 2009. On Feb. 9, we had an answer: Assurant maintained that it had done nothing wrong and that Pat should never have relied on short-term coverage over a long period. But given "the extraordinary circumstances involved," the company agreed to pay his claims from last year, when the policy was still in force. (Pat canceled it on Aug. 22, 2008.) Those extraordinary circumstances, I assume, included the fact that the state insurance department was sniffing around.

The Tumulty family's story didn't quite have a happy ending, but it wasn't an unmitigated tragedy either. But not everyone lives in a county that has a program that can help the working poor. Not everyone finds relief through  state regulators. And not everyone has a national political correspondent sister with both the knowledge and the determination to find solutions.The White House summit going on right now is a first step at giving all Americans a chance to get coverage they can rely on, at a price they can afford, in a system that works.