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Can you afford to get cancer? The answer may surprise scare you.
The cost of cancer treatments are skyrocketing, and more and more insurance companies are choosing to pay less and less for life-saving treatments. Did you know that 20% of people with insurance still can't afford their cancer treatments? And that's not counting the millions who have no health insurance at all. Basically, if you're rich or you have exceptional medical insurance, this isn't something you need to worry about. But for the rest of us, it's a real concern.
I wanted this post to ask the question -- How much is your life worth? But it's a lot more complicated than that. The real question is -- How much does your health insurance company think your life is worth? Let me tell you, it's often not very much, and sometimes it's even worth nothing.
In a recent Associated Press story, the sad reality for cancer patients is being brought to our attention, and it's not pretty.
Cancer patients, brace yourselves. Many new drug treatments cost nearly $100,000 a year, sparking fresh debate about how much a few months more of life is worth.
Job losses have led some people to stop taking Gleevec, a $4,500-a-month drug by Novartis AG that keeps certain leukemias and stomach cancers in remission. Three such cases were recently described in the New England Journal of Medicine, and all those patients suffered relapses.
Another big problem that cancer patients are running into is that more effective and less invasive cancer treatments are not only more costly than the traditional intravenous treatments, but patients are often not given a choice because their insurance company makes the final decision. So even if the oncologist recommends an approved chemo treatment that is less invasive and more effective, insurance companies are saying NO. In other words, a decision that should clearly be made by the doctor along with the patient, is being made by insurance companies (whose interests are with making money not saving lives).
My main thought is that you can't (and shouldn't) put a price on what someone's life is worth. Everyone should have equal access to effective cancer treatments, regardless of the cost. And I don't believe that just because intravenous chemotherapy has been the mainstay for administering chemo, that insurance companies should be allowed to put new pill forms of chemotherapy in the category of prescription medications (thus making them more costly to the patient). Chemo is chemo, and it shouldn't matter how it is administered. Chemo drugs should be paid for equally by insurance companies, and the decision about what treatment is best for each patient should be made by the patient and their doctor (not by for-profit insurance companies).
What do you think?
In most other cases, when it comes to medical treatments, the less medically invasive option is also the least expensive. And because it is less invasive, the risks for infections and other complications related to treatment are minimized as well. A good example of how invasive treatments are more costly than less invasive treatments is heart bipass surgery vs. stents.
For many patients with triple-vessel or left main disease, drug-eluting stents provide similar outcomes to bypass surgery -- and for less money.
[t]he stented patients reported feeling better overall and, in the two month period following the procedure, stents patients recovered their quality of life far more quickly. In the end, at one-year, the results for both arms of the trial coincided with no significant difference.
Dr. Cohen's
