Tag Archives: chemotherapy

Medicare

Chemotherapy Payment Reform: Medicare Is Missing the Elephant in the Room

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cigarettes-2Last May I wrote about the uproar over Medicare’s proposed changes to how it will pay doctors who inject drugs in their offices. This largely concerns chemotherapy. Currently, physicians buy the drugs and Medicare reimburses them the Average Sales Price (ASP) plus 6 percent. The proposed reform would cut the mark-up to 2.5 percent and add a flat fee of $16.80 per injection.

I did not think the reform would have a positive impact, but I also thought criticism was overblown. Well, Medicare has managed to irritate all the affected interest groups to such a degree that it is likely to toss the proposal and go back to the drawing board. Continue reading Chemotherapy Payment Reform: Medicare Is Missing the Elephant in the Room →

Health Care Costs

To Negotiate the Third-Party Payment Bureaucracy, Don’t Get Cancer

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A growing number of patients are being denied access to newer oral chemotherapy drugs or are required to shoulder hefty out-of-pocket costs, sometimes thousands of dollars a month, for cancer pills with annual price tags of more than $75,000. The reason is rooted in a reimbursement system that covers IV chemotherapy as a medical benefit but considers less-invasive oral chemotherapy to be part of a patient’s drug plan, which tends to be far less generous. Some plans cap drug benefits at $5,000 annually, which can amount to less than a month’s supply of chemotherapy pills. The disparity is likely to affect increasing numbers of cancer patients, because 25 percent of 400 chemotherapy drugs in the development pipeline are oral.

Full article on expensive cancer drugs and treatments.

Health Alerts

Chemophobia

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Have you ever noticed that there is a huge mismatch between the skills, talents, abilities and sheer numbers of the professional scaremongers among us and the topics we most need to be alarmed about?

That is, the scariest threats to human health and safety receive almost no attention from those who are most adept at frightening ordinary citizens, while threats that are trivial and maybe even nonexistent are the subject of an inordinate amount of ballyhoo.

What brings all this to mind is a President’s Cancer Panel report that reads like it was plagiarized from the junk science screeds published by anti-chemical activist groups. (It’s all the more surprising because the two-member panel was appointed by George W. Bush!)

By the way, if you enjoy a good scary movie but are turned off by excessive bloodletting, I recommend the original Steve McQueen version of “The Blob.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1G8hI7aSSc

Beware of the Blob

 

Continue reading Chemophobia →

Physicians

Doctors Who Don’t Listen to Patients

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Drug makers learn about adverse reactions from the use of their drugs by getting reports from doctors, who get reports from patients. But what if the doctors ignore the patients’ reports? That, it turns out, is not unusual. Among chemotherapy patients, for example:

  • Patients report fatigue a third more often than doctors and nurses relay those reports.
  • Appetite loss is reported four times as often by patients as by doctors and nurses.
  • For nausea and diarrhea, it’s about twice as often.
Interesting Links

2009/12/7

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A newly approved chemotherapy drug will cost about $30,000 a month: Is the prospect of ObamaCare the reason?

More bad news for seniors: [Home health care] currently accounts for 3.7 percent of the Medicare budget, but would absorb 10.2 percent of the savings squeezed from Medicare by the House bill and 9.4 percent of savings in the Senate bill, the Congressional Budget Office says.

The U.S. says it approved $142 million in commercial and donated medical exports to Cuba in 2008. So why did less than 1 percent of it get there?

One way to deal with dissatisfied customers: After Indonesian woman complains about hospital in e-mail, the government puts her in jail.

MedPAC Medicare spending survey: Miami-Dade is 39% above the national average; Honolulu is 25% below.