Relentless Health Value

In the April issue of Value-Based Cancer Care (that’s a journal), there’s an article talking about a keynote presentation and a study highlighting a big problem for patients with cancer: toxicity. It’s a fact that some chemo agents are pretty toxic, but in this health care podcast I am talking about financial toxicity. The financial burden of cancer care has a seriously negative influence on patients’ quality of life. This keynote speaker quoted in the Value-Based Cancer Care article implored his fellow oncologists: “Think twice before ordering costly interventions that may have little impact on the clinical course,” he said. This might be difficult for a number of reasons, and one of them is that oncology centers make money, a whole lot of money, sometimes the most money, from infusing cancer medications. It’s this little payment paradigm called “buy and bill.” The cancer center buys the meds and then gets paid an additional fee to infuse the drug. This fee is a percentage of the drug cost. It ranges from 4.