Limitation of Insurance Coverage and Ultimate Limitations to Quality Healthcare

Healthcare is moving to a more cost effective agenda rather than the best and latest treatments. Insurance functions much like middle men, facilitating standard treatment to cut costs and many times the patient falls by the wayside, especially for cancer and chronic disease. At Unipathic Medicine, we urge physicians to cut the middle men out! With an inflated insurance policy a patient will get wholesale price but only be provided with standard options – that's simply not enough for cancer and chronic disease. The fact of the matter is insurance limits your ability to get well. Who wants a government health care system that is all about cost saving and not patient healing? Doctors can choose the medication that is better for insurance purposes while in pursuit of profit, but what about the patient? There is a better way. Unipathic Medicine provides the best international and technological treatments to patients by stepping outside of the limitations of insurance and delivers the highest standards of personalized care.

Sally Pipes, President of the Pacific Research Institute, sheds some light on the drug/insurance merger that is keeping patients bogged down paying for new medicine instead of digging into the root of the problem. It’s called the 340B program. From Pipes, “Passed in 1992, the 340B program was designed to help the poor and uninsured afford expensive prescription drugs. The 340B program requires drug companies to offer drugs at a discount to eligible hospitals and “contract pharmacies” that work with those hospitals. These discounts are usually around 20 to 50 percent of the cost of a drug.” This might seem innocent enough but the program was abused and looking at Duke University Hospital, “In 2012, the hospital reported profits of $69.7 million. The hospital says it saved $48.3 million in drug costs thanks to the 340B program. So executives at a single hospital were able to triple their profits thanks to a program designed to help the poor.” It is outrageous that hospitals benefit by selling certain drugs and that is why changes are not being implemented in the medical industry. Unipathic Medicine steps outside of the limited box called insurance.

To fully understand insurance you must understand standard of care. Standard of care establishes guidelines for how physicians treat patients. It means x disease is treated with y medication. This happens because of insurance reimbursements and medical board direction, and the patient can easily get stuck in this system. When a patient pays out of pocket, treatments outside of the standard of care finally become available to them and in turn we see those patients getting well due to the personalization factor.

Patient centered care is the policy physicians should live by and that means doing the least amount of harm to patients by limiting drug use. You must first correct the underlying causes of the disease before patients get better, and drugs mostly just prolong disease. Insurance many times promotes subpar treatments in order to cut costs (in the form of drugs). Unipathic Medicine encourages cancer and chronic disease suffers to go outside of insurance to get the treatment they need and prefer. If you have any questions or want more information about Unipathic Medicine, feel free to contact us.

References

[1] Pipes, Sally. “In Federal Drug Program, Hospitals and Pharmacies Use the Poor to Get Rich.” Forbes. August 15, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypipes/2014/08/15/in-federal-drug-program-hospitals-and-pharmacies-use-the-poor-to-get-rich/