Kerry Burns, of Coventry, left, confers with Elizabeth Edwards, of the Center for American Progress and wife of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, as they testified on Tuesday.

AP / Harry Hamburg

WASHINGTON — A Senate panel heard testimony Tuesday about how a Coventry couple was driven into bankruptcy proceedings, including what they viewed as a “humiliating round of credit counseling,” by the medical bills stemming from their son’s fatal illness.

Kerry Burns described to senators the 13-month illness of her son, Finnegan, who died in a Washington hospital last March at the age of 4½. Burns and her husband, Patrick, had taken leaves from their jobs in order to be at the boy’s side through several surgeries at three hospitals, living on disability and unemployment pay and falling so far behind on their bills that they could not recover financially.

“The emotional hardship my husband and I endured over the course of our son’s hospitalization pales in comparison to what we have felt since his loss,” Burns said, referring to their “financial ruin,” as she called it, and the humbling experience of filing for bankruptcy.

In particular, Burns singled out the bankruptcy system’s requirement that she and her husband take a computerized class in credit counseling. It was “sort of a slap in the face.” The Burnses said they felt insulted by the tone the class, which included questions “about why we were going bankrupt and how we could have avoided the situation in which we currently find ourselves.”

Burns was one of several witnesses at a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee called by its chairman, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, to consider his legislation to make it easier for those burdened with medical bills to go into bankruptcy.

Testifying in favor of the Whitehouse legislation was Elizabeth Edwards, an attorney with experience in bankruptcy law who is also the wife of former presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

There was no dispute among senators and witnesses that a credit-counseling questionnaire routinely required of those filing for personal bankruptcy was ill-suited to the circumstances of the Burns family. “Honestly, what are you going to tell the Burnses?” asked Edwards. “Don’t get sick? Don’t let your son get sick?”

Burns said the family’s medical insurance paid most of the $5 million in bills incurred for the treatment of their son, who had been diagnosed at birth with cystic fibrosis. But they fell behind on their payment of uncovered medical expenses, she said, exhausting savings, “cashing in our retirement funds and selling belongings for extra money.”

Burns said she and her husband first consulted a lawyer about filing for bankruptcy in April, around the time that Patrick Burns returned to work at Seascape Lawn Care. Kerry Burns remained unemployed until she found work at a Cranston health-care facility.

In the meantime, they lost their house to foreclosure and learned that the bankruptcy filing would cost them about $1,300 — money they did not have. She testified that she and her husband were so troubled by the credit-counseling class that they stopped pursuing it, understanding that they must eventually complete the electronic course before they can go into bankruptcy and start with a clean financial slate.

Burns testified that at one point she and her husband got up to 60 dunning calls a day from creditors.

Whitehouse called the mandatory class on credit “a horrific and unjustified government intrusion on the Burnses.”

Whitehouse said that under his legislation, which he may try to include in the broad overhaul of the medical system now pending in Congress, bankruptcy filing would be permitted for anybody who owes more than $10,000 or 10 percent of his or her income in medical bills.

Whitehouse would also exempt those with high medical debt from meeting the income tests required of other debtors seeking bankruptcy protection.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the subcommittee, questioned whether new rules should be made for debtors burdened with medical bills. Sessions defended the current system which, as he described it, makes personal bankruptcy available under “Chapter 7 proceedings — to anybody whose income is below the median in the state where he or she lives.” The bankruptcy effectively wipes out their responsibility to pay many forms of debt.

Sessions said those with higher incomes are required to undergo a more detailed review of their wealth and may have to file under a different chapter of the bankruptcy code, in which a judge may insist that they repay some portion of certain debts.

For people such as the Burnses, who qualify as earning less than the median income, “all their debt can be wiped out and they don’t have to pay the hospital a dime,” Sessions said.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com