I think the two should be presented side by side instead of as a binary choice. Going into hospice and continuing treatment were presented as an either/or option. How and when would you have preferred that conversation to have happened?Ī: I wish we’d had a matter-of-fact discussion when we were still considering aggressive treatment. Q: The conversation about your husband’s end-of-life needs occurred less than a week before he died. But if someone had said, “Here’s a therapy: It has only a slight chance of helping you, and here’s what it costs,”-that’s another piece of information that at least adds some rationality to the decision. If a treatment is free, it’s like you almost have to take it. I later found out that there had been a very slim chance that IL-2 could have helped him, but it was covered by insurance. If you had known the cost of each test or procedure ahead of time, how might that have made a difference?Ī: Here’s a specific example: When his cancer metastasized, Terence was put on interleukin-2, which made him very sick. Q: Your husband’s medical bills totaled $618,616 (most of it covered by insurance).

I realized later that the doctors were just as confused as I was. But the different doctors disagreed about what type of kidney cancer it was-papillary or collecting duct-as well as the overall direction to take with his treatment. Part of my frustration was that I wanted to know what “the right answer” was. The system is set up in these silos, and nobody has figured out how to include the patient. Q: What frustrated you about the way your husband’s doctors interacted with one another, and with both of you, during his treatment?Ī: Throughout Terence’s illness, his doctors talked to one another behind the scenes, but there was never anyone who tried to make sense of everything for us. Cancer Today recently spoke with Bennett, an editor at large for Bloomberg News, about some of the most vexing aspects of her husband’s treatment. And it raises tough ethical and economic questions about the delivery of, and costs associated with, cancer care in the United States. The book pinpoints the difficulties the couple encountered in navigating the labyrinthine health care system for seven years. As a result, Bennett’s memoir, The Cost of Hope, published in 2012, is more than the story of a family facing cancer.

The cost of hope by amanda bennett