March 4 (Bloomberg) -- The single biggest item in the medical bills from Terence Foley’s seven-year fight with kidney cancer was $27,360, for each of four intravenous treatments with Avastin, a cancer drug made by Genentech Inc.
The charges from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where Foley died in 2007 at the age of 67, were included in almost 5,000 pages of medical records compiled by Bloomberg. The amount was more than four times what Genentech said the cost should have been and four times the total paid by Foley’s insurer.
2 comments:
It is quite standard to mark up up to 6x and then bill the poor cash customer that amount and then do a less than 2x with the various health insurers that negotiate better. The markup on this was surprisingly less than that.
One of the reasons to have health insurance is to get in on the negotiated rates that big hospital charges for big pharma.
Aside from the disease that is suffering by the patient, the hospital billing is also one of the patient's problem because of the high charges in their billing.
Post a Comment