RE: The 1 year medical cost for an Advanced PCA patient

January 21, 2011

That is fascinating .Whether or not a man has insurance, a hospital and a doctor will require him to sign a statement saying that he is personally responsible and liable for full payment of any bill. If he's got insurance, the hospital and doctor have already signed statements with the insurer saying they will accept what the insurer pays them, even if their bill is higher. So in this case, the total amount paid comes to ~ $49K.However if the poor fellow is uninsured he's truly up the creek. He's on the hook for the full amount, well over double what the doctor and hospital are willing to accept. If he doesn't pay up it's very likely he'll have collection agents beating on his door and/or lawyers suing him. Alan

Billed Amount

Applied to Deductible

Paid by Plan

Patient Responsibility

Paid by HRA

$117,005.53

$ 1,467.97

$ 46,156.01

$ 1,684.97

$ 1,000.00

January 21, 2011

That is fascinating .Whether or not a man has insurance, a hospital and a doctor will require him to sign a statement saying that he is personally responsible and liable for full payment of any bill. If he's got insurance, the hospital and doctor have already signed statements with the insurer saying they will accept what the insurer pays them, even if their bill is higher. So in this case, the total amount paid comes to ~ $49K.However if the poor fellow is uninsured he's truly up the creek. He's on the hook for the full amount, well over double what the doctor and hospital are willing to accept. If he doesn't pay up it's very likely he'll have collection agents beating on his door and/or lawyers suing him. Alan

Billed Amount

Applied to Deductible

Paid by Plan

Patient Responsibility

Paid by HRA

$117,005.53

$ 1,467.97

$ 46,156.01

$ 1,684.97

$ 1,000.00

January 21, 2011

Alan, I agree, this is frightening! I'm not even sure what sparked me to pull this data?

I had logged on to my UnitedHealthCare account and noticed my deductible and

out of pockets amounts had reset like they alway do in January. for some reason

I started poking around in their report genrator and noticed I could pull everything for

last year. A quick export to Excel and there it was, all $117k

I must share that UnitedHealthCare has been great to me/us. MD was 'in-network'.

The Oncology group I am going to see in Atlanta next week is 'in-network' and they just approved

me for Provenge, though I am not going to pursue that at this time since I am about to start Abiraterone.

I'm not saying that they treat everyone this way, but if you have an insurance choice, and one of the choices

is UHC, make it.

That is fascinating .Whether or not a man has insurance, a hospital and a doctor will require him to sign a statement saying that he is personally responsible and liable for full payment of any bill. If he's got insurance, the hospital and doctor have already signed statements with the insurer saying they will accept what the insurer pays them, even if their bill is higher. So in this case, the total amount paid comes to ~ $49K.

However if the poor fellow is uninsured he's truly up the creek. He's on the hook for the full amount, well over double what the doctor and hospital are willing to accept. If he doesn't pay up it's very likely he'll have collection agents beating on his door and/or lawyers suing him.

Alan

Billed Amount

Applied to Deductible

Paid by Plan

Patient Responsibility

Paid by HRA

$117,005.53

$ 1,467.97

$ 46,156.01

$ 1,684.97

$ 1,000.00

-- Emersonwww.flhw.org

Every 2.25 minutes a man is diagnosed with prostate cancer.Every 16.5 minutes a man dies from the disease.

January 21, 2011