Amanda Bennet lost her husband of 20 years to a grueling battle with kidney cancer December 14, 2007. Bennet’s husband, Terence Bryan Foley, fought for seven years, and had been told several times that he was going to die, yet somehow made it through. Bennet and her husband were forced to make several difficult decisions throughout the seven years, and every choice they made was made to save Terence’s life regardless of the price. They had “robust” medical insurance, which allowed them to keep on fighting. Bennet says, “We didn’t have to think about money, allocation of medical resources, the struggles of roughly 46 million uninsured Americans, or the impact on corporate bottom lines.”
Terence’s medical bills over the entire seven years totaled up to $618,616, and “no one can say for sure if the treatments helped extend his life,” states Bennet. Bennet went on to say, “The only thing I can see that the money bought for certain was confirmation he was dying.” After Terence’s death, Bennet says she spent months going through 5,000 pages of documents collected from six hospitals, four insurers, Medicare, three oncologists, and a surgeon. And after filing through all the documents, she says she started to question what they were actually getting billed for. All of Terence’s bills were confusing, and took days to decipher. Bennet says, “The documents revealed an economic system in which the sellers don’t set the prices and the buyers don’t know what they are. Prices bear little relation to demand or how well goods and services work.”
Bennet says they tried any treatment that the doctor offered because they believed it would help Terrence keep living, and “some drugs Terence took probably did him no good.” And drugs that had a small chance of actually helping were expensive, yet they still agreed that Terrence should take them. This all led Bennet to ask herself, “When is it time to quit?” She says that all the choices they made over the seven years in regards to Terence’s health would have not made any sense to any economist that looked solely at the numbers, but they were very hopeful that Terence would defeat the odds and pull through; Bennet says, “It is hard to put a price on that kind of hope.”
If you are one of the millions of uninsured Americans, visit pricedoc.com to compare prices for any medical procedure you might need, and to find affordable, quality doctors and dentists in your area.
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The original article disclosed interesting medical billing costs. The bills totaled $618,616 and the actual settlement payments totaled $254,176 by the “robust” good insurance plan. That in itself is a 60% discount. This process also generated 4750 pages of paperwork. If PriceDoc empowers individuals to negotiate similar discounts and spare the administrative cost of generating 4750 pages of bills and reports it is suggestive that 70% discounts against billable price can be obtained by individuals properly empowered with tools of transparency and negotiation. Once the PriceDoc methodology becomes broadly accepted articles like the one discussed here are suggestive that 70% savings from current health care costs are obtainable and possible.