The widow of a Buffalo Grove firefighter who died of duty-based cancer in 2018 said this week she is now facing a battle with the village for health care coverage for her family.
Kim Hauber, 42, filed a lawsuit earlier this year, asking that the village provide her family with medical insurance under the Illinois Public Safety Employee Benefits Act, according to the complaint filed in March.
The state law requires health care coverage be provided without cost to the families of public employees who suffer duty-related catastrophic injuries or death, said Thomas Mazur, an attorney for the Hauber family.
Earlier this year, a trio of state appellate court judges ruled unanimously that the family of Kevin Hauber, a 51-year-old Buffalo Grove firefighter who died of colon cancer in 2018, be awarded a full line-of-duty pension benefit.
That decision did not address the family’s health insurance coverage, for which Kim Hauber has been paying a monthly premium of more than $2,500 to cover her and her four young daughters — a 15-year-old and 12-year-old triplets, Mazur said.
“All she’s asking for is to be in the same position she would have been in if her husband had not been killed in the line of duty,” Mazur said.
The village of Buffalo Grove declined to comment on the lawsuit.
But in a July 24 letter to the Buffalo Grove Village Board, Village Manager Dane Bragg said his review of the Hauber family’s application for health care coverage found it to be lacking a key component required by law: that Kevin Hauber’s line of duty death was a result of responding to an emergency.
“There does not appear to be sufficient evidence from the application and supporting materials to establish that the cancer resulted from a response to an emergency situation," Bragg stated in the letter, adding that a hearing should be scheduled to allow the family the opportunity to provide “adequate evidence of attribution to emergency response.”
A veteran firefighter and paramedic in Buffalo Grove, Hauber died in January 2018, roughly four years after being diagnosed with colon cancer. According to the findings of two medical experts, Hauber’s death was likely the result of performing “acts of duty, or cumulative acts of duty,” which involved repeated exposure to toxic smoke and carcinogens while on the job.
The Firefighter Cancer Support Network, an advocacy group, has maintained cancer was the cause of 70 percent of career firefighter line-of-duty deaths in 2016, with firefighters having a 14% higher risk of dying from the disease than the public.
The most recent court ruling in the Hauber case arrived in January after the village appealed to the Second District Appellate Court to overturn a 100% line-of-duty death pension benefit awarded to the Hauber family, which was approved by the village’s Firefighter Pension Board in 2018 and upheld in 2019 by a Lake County Circuit Court judge.
Buffalo Grove officials have said that the village appealed the lower court’s ruling to award Kim Hauber the 100% line-of-duty death pension benefit due to concerns that it could set what they described as “a dangerous and costly legal precedent.”
Kim Hauber said Thursday she is disheartened to be facing another court battle with the village, adding that she and her daughters “unfortunately had to mentally prepare ourselves for more litigation."
“We remain disappointed in the village’s decision to not uphold their commitment to both Kevin and our family,” Kim Hauber said. “They agreed that Kevin was a hero to the community he served, and for that acknowledgment, we are grateful. We are not asking for anything above what we are legally entitled to.”
Hauber, who spent a recent afternoon supervising her four young daughters' remote learning from their McHenry home, said the new court battle is the last thing her family needs as they try to rebuild their lives.
”We miss Kevin very much, and I hope that no other spouse of a firefighter ever has to go through this much extra heartbreak and stress after losing a spouse to occupational cancer," Hauber said.
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