Life, Interrupted: Medical Bills, Insurance and Uncertainty
By SULEIKA JAOUADLike a lot of other young people, I never thought about health insurance until I got sick. I was 22, and my adult life was just beginning. But less than a year after walking across the stage at my college graduation, I received an unexpected diagnosis - acute myeloid leukemia - and with it came a flurry of consultations, tests and appointments. From early on, my doctors told me I would need chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.
But before the shock of the news could settle in - before I could consider where and how I would be treated - I did what most Americans must do when beset with a medical crisis: I called my insurance provider.
Before I made that first phone call, I confess I didn't know exactly what the word "premium" meant. And "co-pay" sounded to me like what happens when friends split the bill at dinner. Certainly, the term "lifetime limit" had no meaning to me yet. The last time I could remember getting sick had been a two-day bout of food poisoning during my junior semester abroad in Egypt. Now, I was facing cancer - and I was beginning to get worried about coverage from an insurance plan I knew virtually nothing about.
If you have a chronic illness in America, there's a good chance you also hold a degree in Health Insurance 101, whether you want to or not. The first thing I learned was how lucky I was to have health insurance at all. (An estimated 49 million Americans, and nearly one-third of Americans 18 to 24 years old, are uninsured.) I was on my parents' insurance, a plan provided through my father's employer. It's a comprehensive plan that will cover me until age 26 - two years from now.
I've been fortunate to be treated by excellent doctors at world-class hospitals. In the last year alone, my insurance has covered over a million dollars in medical expenses, including a bone marrow transplant and 10 hospitalizations amounting to a combined five months of inpatient care. It all sounds straightforward when I explain it like that. But even if you have insurance, the cost of health care - in dollars as well as in time and stress - is incredibly high.
Conservative Maine group accidentally shows success of pre-LePage health care policy
The Maine Heritage Policy Center, a conservative advocacy group, put out a paper today arguing that Maine shouldn’t expand Medicaid under Obamacare.
One of its core arguments is:
Maine’s uninsured rate is nearly the same as it was in 1999, while government-run health care enrollment has more than doubled in the same time period, from 10 percent of those insured to more than 23 percent in 2010.
And the MHPC presents this chart:
As you can see, between 1999 and 2010, the percentage of Maine people without insurance did indeed change little, with 1% more Mainers having insurance at the end of this period than at the start.Some drugs are going generic this year and next
Posted Aug. 06, 2012, at 4:36 p.m.
Dozens of brand-name prescription drugs are losing their patent protection, allowing generic versions to enter the market and consumers to save 30 to 80 percent on those medications, said David Belian, director of media relations for the Generic Pharmaceutical Association.
Generic forms of drugs have the same active ingredients as their brand-name counterparts but are significantly cheaper because they don’t invest in clinical trials or advertising, Belian said.
About 80 percent of prescriptions are filled with generic drugs, and they have a good track record, said Howard Schiff, executive director of the Maryland Pharmacists Association. But some generic drugs may not work as well as the original brands, so before making the switch consider consulting your doctor who can write a prescription specifying brand-name or generic, Schiff said.
These are the prescription drugs that have been or are expected to be released as generics in 2012 and 2013, according to Medco Health Solutions, which manages pharmacy benefits for employer health plans.
Doctors call out Komen for overselling mammograms
Posted Aug. 06, 2012, at 8:47 a.m.
MINNEAPOLIS — Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the largest breast-cancer advocacy group, was criticized by doctors for overstating the benefits of mammograms and failing to tell women about the risks in its last public advertising campaign.
The most recent Komen ads urged regular mammograms and implied that skipping them was harmful, Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz, directors of the Center for Medicine and the Media at Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, New Hampshire, wrote today in the British Medical Journal. The advantages are much less clear and women should be told the positive and negative to make an informed decision, they said.
Cancer screening programs have been questioned in recent years as studies showed they can identify tumors that may never cause harm, though treating them has physical, emotional and financial implications. The U.S. Preventive Service Task Force spurred controversy starting in 2009 with its recommendations to limit mammograms at younger ages for women and eliminate a standard prostate cancer test for men.
“We think Komen can do a lot better by giving women the information they need to weigh the benefits and the harms,” Woloshin said in a telephone interview. “They aren’t doing a good job. The ads are misleading and give false promises.”
The ads emphasize that five-year survival for breast cancer is 98 percent when caught early, and 23 percent when it’s not. Those percentages are apples and oranges, Woloshin said, and can’t be directly compared. A tiny tumor, detectable only with advanced screening, may take more than five years to kill a woman, while one that can be felt by hand would be deadly faster, regardless of whether any treatment is used.
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