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In November 2005, Runi Limary, a sixth-grade teacher in Austin, Texas, was diagnosed with invasive cancer in her right breast. "I was only 28, and I was in total shock and disbelief," she recalls. "I kept thinking the pathologist had made a mistake, that there was no way this was actually happening to me."

Because she was so young, she wondered whether she had inherited a mutation of the BRCA 1 or 2 gene, which would significantly increase her risk of developing a second breast cancer as well as ovarian cancer.

"I'd already decided to have my right breast removed, but if I carried the BRCA mutation, I wanted to have a prophylactic mastectomy on the left breast," she says. But her insurance wouldn't pay for the $3,000 gene test, so she opted to wait and see what happened.

Then in 2007, Limary switched jobs, and her new provider covered 80 percent of the BRCA test. "I was tired of worrying about every itch in my left breast," she says, so she ponied up her share for the blood test...