What is all this costing?

Thanks to Barbie’s looking into insurance choices and nagging, we have very good health insurance.  We are both on Medicare and we have Blue Cross Blue Shield Medex, which picks up anything that Medicare does not pick up.  Incidentally, this is also thanks to Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had the foresight to twist enough arms to get Medicare through Congress.  Can you imagine the private market for health insurance for people over 65?  Let’s hope we never have to find out.  Our only real exposure is to co-pays on drug costs, some of which are mind-boggling.  Last year, when we had to select our drug insurance plan, we were not on any expensive drugs, so we chose the cheapest plan available.  This coming year we may have to reconsider that choice.

On a monthly basis, I receive reports called CMS Medicare Summary Notices.  Most of the time, I have no idea at the time of service, what a medical interaction costs.  Only after a number of months when the CMS notices come, do I find out what it costs.  [How someone is supposed to have “skin in the game” and to make medical choices based upon cost when you don’t know the costs is a mystery to me.]  At any rate, I am finding out how much my treatments are costing, now that I am getting these CMS notices.  Obviously, the costs will go on.  Presumably with the hospitalization associated with the stem cell transplant, they will only get higher.  But here is what I have gotten notices of so far.

Only $82.556, and counting.  I especially like that some of the charges for identical services are different.  Given that the bills do not all come order in which the services were preformed, we may well get additional bills from this time period.  

For the last 3 cycles of chemotherapy I was getting a cocktail of 3 drugs, Velcade, Dexomethasome, and Revlimid.  For some odd reason, the Revlimid was a drug consumed at home, not at the hospital.  So it fell under our drug insurance program, not the regular health insurance.  14 days of Revlimid cost $5,453.97.  Our drug insurance had a co-pay of $2404.48 for the first cycle of Revlimid.  Luckily we qualified to have a foundation created by Celgene, the drug company that manufactures Revlimid, pick up all but $30 of the co-pay.  Naturally, the co-pay for subsequent cycles of Revlimid was much less at $592.28.  But we still only had to pay $30.  You might think that $2404.48 and $592.28 would be some round % of the total cost.  No, $2404.48 is 44.0868% and $592.28 is 10.8596%.  Go figure.  So if you add the cost of Revlimid into the doctor/hospital charges, you get a total of $98,918.07.  I also had a number of prescriptions to deal with side effects.  In June + July those cost $171.80.  So the overall total is $99,089.87.  A pretty astounding number.