Many health insurance plans won’t cover new medicines in cancer treatment that are both life-saving and cost-cutting.
As a result, people battling cancer have to choose between treatment that will save their lives and treatment that is paid for, writes Robert Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.
Most insurers are behind the times, following Medicare’s 40-year-old practice of covering IV treatments and having a $3,000 cap on out-of-pocket costs, but requiring the patient to pay for up to half the cost of oral cancer medications — even when those treatments are the only ones that work, Goldberg writes.
Read his full New York Post commentary here.