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Comment by jlrbuellv | Hacker News Reader

Not OP, but I received a bone marrow transplant 6 months ago, and the amount billed to my insurance so far has exceed 2 million USD. So I assume no transplant team could survive without someone agreeing (in advance) to pay the bill for the transplant and post transplant related care. If I had walked in with a big enough wad of cash, it's possible I could have got on the list too, but my case has pretty much gone as smoothly as possible, with complication I could see the bill approaching a much bigger number,

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> Not OP, but I received a bone marrow transplant 6 months ago, and the amount billed to my insurance so far has exceed 2 million USD.

Transplants are expensive, but the amount billed to your insurance is not a meaningful number in any way. Hospitals don't actually expect insurers to pay that; they set the number absurdly high as a starting point for the back-and-forth negotiations. This is particularly true for very expensive procedures which are almost always paid for by private insurance - both because of the expense, but in some cases by law.

(On that note, even looking at the amount paid by your insurance is misleading as well, because if you're on private insurance, you're paying not just for your own care, but to cover the care of people who are on Medicare and Medicaid, since private insurers are required to cover the costs of those patients' care as well. This is especially true for high-end, expensive, and/or chronic or terminal treatments like dialysis.)

If this makes thankful you have insurance, maybe the number is inflated. It's not unheard of for the net amount paid to be far less.

Any patient in the situation should be thankful for insurance. When your liver is failing, you have your hands full.

The only major variable you should try to optimize is wait list time. Outcomes are roughly comparable across centers and are monitored by the government.

From what I have read about transplants, I would not automatically assume the figure above is inflated. They seem to generally be quite expensive.

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