thedrifter
02-18-07, 11:22 AM
Posted on Sun, Feb. 18, 2007
Lottery millionaire trying to buy time
Given a year to live, he seeks treatment in Phila. - but the piecemeal payout won't cover costs.
By Ben Dobbin
Associated Press
NAPLES, N.Y. - Five weeks after Wayne Schenk learned he has inoperable lung cancer, the Naples man hit a $1 million New York Lottery jackpot on a $5 scratch-off ticket.
With doctors giving Schenk little more than a year to live, the former Marine has no need for a new house or a fancy car. He is hoping to buy a little time - by checking into a year-old Philadelphia hospital that specializes in advanced-stage cancers.
"I understand money can't buy everything, but money can prolong things, you know?" Schenk, 51, said.
It's proving much trickier than he imagined.
The $1 million prize pays out in $50,000 annual installments over 20 years, and the Eastern Regional Medical Center in Philadelphia's Juniata Park section told him that it would need $125,000 up front and $250,000 in reserve to be tapped as his treatment proceeded. His insurance with the Department of Veterans Affairs cannot be transferred to an out-of-network provider.
"If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all," Schenk said with a wheezy laugh as he sat in a friend's pickup outside a lawyer's office where he went to draw up his will.
Schenk cashed his first lottery check - $34,000 after taxes - and is still scrambling to find a lump-sum arrangement. He has been offered a lump sum of more than $400,000, but after taxes he'd be left with only a little more than $200,000.
Chris Hamrick, a spokesman for Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., and opened its for-profit hospital in Philadelphia in December 2005, said officials were looking into how they could help.
Schenk also has turned to his state assemblyman, who plans to cosponsor a bill to allow the lottery to award a lump sum in extraordinary cases. But a legislative change could take longer than Schenk has to live.
For now, the longtime smoker, whose parents died of lung cancer in the 1990s, drives every few weeks to the VA Medical Center in Syracuse for chemotherapy - and is looking into enlisting in an experimental cancer-drug trial at a hospital in Canada.
"The VA is a very good hospital, but the VA works on a hundred different things," said Schenk, who served on a ship off Lebanon while in the Marines from 1976 to 1980. "There's newer treatments out there. It takes the government a little time to come around to some of the other ways."
Schenk, who is unmarried and has no children, bought a tavern on Main Street in Naples a year ago after more than 20 years of working odd jobs in construction, with the highway department and at a ski resort in the Finger Lakes region. He's trying to take each day in stride.
"I haven't given up, but it's getting right down there where time is of the essence," he said. "There's only one way to go, and that's up. I've already been down."
Ellie
Lottery millionaire trying to buy time
Given a year to live, he seeks treatment in Phila. - but the piecemeal payout won't cover costs.
By Ben Dobbin
Associated Press
NAPLES, N.Y. - Five weeks after Wayne Schenk learned he has inoperable lung cancer, the Naples man hit a $1 million New York Lottery jackpot on a $5 scratch-off ticket.
With doctors giving Schenk little more than a year to live, the former Marine has no need for a new house or a fancy car. He is hoping to buy a little time - by checking into a year-old Philadelphia hospital that specializes in advanced-stage cancers.
"I understand money can't buy everything, but money can prolong things, you know?" Schenk, 51, said.
It's proving much trickier than he imagined.
The $1 million prize pays out in $50,000 annual installments over 20 years, and the Eastern Regional Medical Center in Philadelphia's Juniata Park section told him that it would need $125,000 up front and $250,000 in reserve to be tapped as his treatment proceeded. His insurance with the Department of Veterans Affairs cannot be transferred to an out-of-network provider.
"If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all," Schenk said with a wheezy laugh as he sat in a friend's pickup outside a lawyer's office where he went to draw up his will.
Schenk cashed his first lottery check - $34,000 after taxes - and is still scrambling to find a lump-sum arrangement. He has been offered a lump sum of more than $400,000, but after taxes he'd be left with only a little more than $200,000.
Chris Hamrick, a spokesman for Cancer Treatment Centers of America, which is based in Schaumburg, Ill., and opened its for-profit hospital in Philadelphia in December 2005, said officials were looking into how they could help.
Schenk also has turned to his state assemblyman, who plans to cosponsor a bill to allow the lottery to award a lump sum in extraordinary cases. But a legislative change could take longer than Schenk has to live.
For now, the longtime smoker, whose parents died of lung cancer in the 1990s, drives every few weeks to the VA Medical Center in Syracuse for chemotherapy - and is looking into enlisting in an experimental cancer-drug trial at a hospital in Canada.
"The VA is a very good hospital, but the VA works on a hundred different things," said Schenk, who served on a ship off Lebanon while in the Marines from 1976 to 1980. "There's newer treatments out there. It takes the government a little time to come around to some of the other ways."
Schenk, who is unmarried and has no children, bought a tavern on Main Street in Naples a year ago after more than 20 years of working odd jobs in construction, with the highway department and at a ski resort in the Finger Lakes region. He's trying to take each day in stride.
"I haven't given up, but it's getting right down there where time is of the essence," he said. "There's only one way to go, and that's up. I've already been down."
Ellie