It used to be financial planning was a field which provided assistance for the golden years (retirement), In the U.S. financial planning is necessary for patients to get their health care. Our amazingly inefficiency expensive (most in the world) health care non-system is now providing such planning to patients to “help” finance their care. Something is terribly wrong here.
His doctor had prescribed the cancer drug Gleevec, but Steiner’s insurance refused to cover its $3,500 monthly cost. Steiner, a warehouse manager for a publisher of Bible-themed literature, and his wife, Brenda, a part-time nurse, made just $30,000 a year. No way could they afford the drug on their own.
“We still had six kids at home — how were we going to come up with that kind of money?” Steiner said. “We couldn’t re-mortgage the house, because it had already been re-mortgaged. I wouldn’t have been able to take the medication. We would have had to just trust in the Lord.”
It was a scary brush with “financial toxicity,” as researchers call the mix of economic stress, anxiety and depression cancer patients often endure. But then Steiner was assigned to Dan Sherman, an oncology social worker at Mercy Health Lacks Cancer Center who within days got a free supply of Gleevec from the manufacturer. He also made sure it was delivered promptly. The package arrived at Steiner’s home on Christmas Eve, his 46th birthday.
In the eight years since, Steiner has faced a series of medical and financial reversals, and each time Sherman has done as much as any doctor to keep Steiner going — scrambling to get the treatment he needed without sending his family into bankruptcy. “He keeps throwing me life rafts before I sink,” Steiner said.
Read the entire article.
Medicynical Note: Health care in the U.S. is a special type of hell if you are not independently wealthy. Something like 60% of bankruptcies in our country are related to medical expenses and it appears from the above article that the first goal of our non-system is to spend all the patient’s savings and then offer assistance.
Our insurance companies’ main goal is to assure profits to share holders, hospitals have a multilevel billing system which ironically bills most those without insurance coverage and least able to pay; our drug companies think nothing of gouging patients to pad their bottom line, because they can (pretty sadistic); and our medical practitioners often are on their receiving end of payments from technology providers to get them to use the company’s product. Care of patient is not the primary concern of many in our health care industry.
There are bright spots. People working to help patient’s figure out the non-system; primary care types working very hard for relatively (compared to some medical specialties) low salaries; our nursing and medical support colleagues who work face to face with patients helping with their care and problems, medical and otherwise.
The Affordable Care Act is a good first step but more needs to be done.
