Money, honey.

It's the elephant in the room.

When you or a loved one is sick or hurt, you're not thinking about money, you're thinking about getting well...and that's just as it should be.

Never the less, analyses over the last several years show that 62% of all personal bankruptcies in the United States are caused by ruinous medical bills.  Not credit card binges, not mortgages, not flim flam investments... ....medical bills.  And 4 out of 5 of those folks actually HAD health insurance.

I suspect we've all heard of the Blue Shield cases where they were paying bonuses to employees to cancel coverage on high dollar cases.  You might even have heard that they were fined two million dollars for dropping over 1,000 insured with expensive claims, but that money went to Los Angeles City attorney's office.  Earlier, they'd promised three million dollars to the insured...but three million dollars across a thousand expensive health claims didn't go very far to help the folks they'd fraudulently dropped.

So yes, please keep your focus on getting well...but do what you can to keep yourself from being financially ruined in the process.  Fight for more and better insurance coverage.  Find out if your doctor has financial stake in how you're treated. 

Ask questions, do your own research:  Avastin and Lucentis are both made by the same company, both equally effective at treating the same condition....but one dose of Avastin costs $50 while a single dose of Lucentis costs $2,000.  Doctors choose the more expensive drug more than half a million times every year, a choice that costs the Medicare program, the largest single customer, an extra $1 billion annually.

GlaxoSmithKline has been found guilty of fraud and just agreed to a three BILLION dollar fine over pharmaceutical misuse.  Earlier this year Abbott Laboratories was fined 1.6 billion dollars and it looks as though Johnson & Johnson will soon be fined two billion dollars. 

Right before Christmas GlaxoSmithKline said it will quit paying doctors to promote their drugs.  We can only hope that these fines motivate ALL pharmaceutical companies to follow suit.

And it doesn't have to be fraud.  My own doctor is great: righteous and true....actively concerned for my good health.  He belongs, like all doctors, to a specific network...and when I needed some imaging done, the network was happy to make an appointment for me at their imaging center...for a cost of about $1,200.  

A few phone calls and I found an independent imaging center in Merrilville that did the exact same work for $160.  I told my doctor and he was happy to send me up there.  Before that, though, he'd had no idea....he's the doctor, his expertise is in getting me well, not in being a good shopper.  I have to do that part myself.

And so should you.