
- “We soon discovered that developing a treatment plan was not going to be as straightforward as we had hoped,” Jodi Wood wrote in
- "This insurance practice requires patients to go through older, oftentimes less expensive and less beneficial drugs — some of which can have adverse side effects — before receiving access to the physician’s first choice for drug treatment," she said. "In other words, patients must fail on several medications before they are permitted to move to costlier but possibly more effective remedies.”
- “In recent years, patients with these diseases have faced increasing difficulty getting their insurers to approve treatments, according to clinicians and patient advocates," the article stated. "In some cases, insurers interrupt treatments that are already underway. In others, they deny it at the outset. Without medication, patients can get infections or even suffer organ failure.”
- "For Blue Cross to say they're not paying for it because it's not in their formulary, they're playing god," Mitchel Chusid told a reporter. "They have control over medication that could save people's lives, and they're saying, 'We're not paying for it.'"
- "For patients dealing with kidney failure, dialysis is often a matter of life or death,"