There is a 42% chance that a cancer diagnosis will cost your entire life savings.

This is partially by design. My wife has a friend whose husband got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. The social workers at the hospital said "look - how fast can you get below the poverty line?" They couldn't do shit for 'em until they could get 'em on welfare, at which point they could tap a different set of funds. So she had to tell all her patients she was no longer practicing medicine and they had to move in with her parents. Two years later and he's beat it and she's back in practice... but literally. "oh, you can pay something? well, that's not good enough. You have to pay EVERYTHING."

It's fucked up from the provider standpoint too. We've had this doctor working for us for four months now. And we had to run every ICD10 code we thought she could possibly bill against our reimbursement rates for every insurance we take with a weighted average for our projected patient makeup. Then we had to subtract our overhead and et voila that's how much we can afford to pay her. That's her max. That's all she'll ever make from us until it's time to renegotiate insurance rates at which point they're as likely to go down as up because dealing with insurance companies is like dealing with Walmart.

It's been four months and we won't even have a decent amount of bills to check to see how close we were guessing because most of the insurance companies? They don't even attempt to pay you for six months. We've got bills outstanding from 18 months ago. So we're hoping? We'll know whether we can pay her more? Or whether we'll have to reexamine our relationship? some time next month. Maybe.

But on no planet. Under no conditions. As chosen by anyone. Does our current system make a lick of sense. Unless you're in the insurance business.