There is a great -and moving- article today on Bloomberg about the very things that I talked about.
The account of the suffering and ordeal lived by this family is a terrible thing to read and confirms much of my original post.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=avRFGNF6Qw_w
Here are some excerpts :
"What he didnât reckon on was that the drug would make him violently ill. But it was the only possible therapy at that time. Injections of the protein -- at $735 a dose -- were intended to stimulate the immune response to help fight off the cancerâs invasion.
The overall response rate was about 10 percent. For most, it did nothing. "
"On Nov. 10, before discharging him, a doctor propped one of Terenceâs scans on a light board and showed us a blizzard of white spots, thousands of tumors covering his lungs.
Avastin wasnât stopping it. "
"Late last year, I waded through a snowstorm to Keith Flahertyâs office in Boston, where he had moved to a new job that would let him intensify his work on targeted therapy. Did we help Terence? Or harm him? Thereâs a possibility, he said, that the treatment actually made the cancer worse, causing it to rage out of control at the end. Or, as another doctor suggested in passing at the time, that the strokes were a side effect of the Sutent, and not the cancer. "
"The documents revealed an economic system in which the sellers donât set and the buyers donât know the prices. The University of Pennsylvania hospital charged more than 12 times what Medicare at the time reimbursed for a chest scan. One insurer paid a hospital for 80 percent of the $3,232 price of a scan, while another covered 24 percent. Insurance companies negotiated their own rates, and neither my employers nor I paid the difference between the sticker and discounted prices.
âItâs Completely Insaneâ
In this economic system, prices of goods and services bear little relation to the demand for them or their cost to make -- or, as it turns out, the good or harm they do.
âNo other nation would allow a health system to be run the way we do it. Itâs completely insane,â said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a political economy professor at Princeton University, who has advised Congress, the Veteranâs Administration and other agencies on health-care economics.
Taking it all into account, the data showed we had made a bargain that hardly any economist looking solely at the numbers would say made sense. Why did we do it? "
"I learned that over the years of Terenceâs battle with cancer, some insurers drove harder bargains than others. In December 2006, for example, UnitedHealthcare, a unit of UnitedHealth Group Inc., paid $2,586 to the University of Pennsylvania hospital for a chest scan; in March 2007, after I switched employers, WellPoint Inc.âs Empire Blue Cross & Blue Shield paid $776 for the same $3,232 bill.
The entire medical bill for seven years, in fact, was steeply discounted. The $618,616 became $254,176 when the insurers paid their share and imposed their discounts. Of that, Terence and I were responsible for $9,468 -- less than 4 percent. "
