8/14/2023 0 Comments Define redacted medically![]() ![]() That does not count outside earnings derived from a much publicized waiver he received from the university that, according to the Houston Chronicle, allows him to maintain unspecified “financial ties with his three principal pharmaceutical companies.”ĭePinho’s salary is nearly two and a half times the $750,000 paid to Francisco Cigarroa, the chancellor of entire University of Texas system, of which MD Anderson is a part. Ronald DePinho’s total compensation last year was $1,845,000. The president of MD Anderson is paid like someone running a prosperous business. That’s a profit margin of 26% on revenue of $2.05 billion, an astounding result for such a service-intensive enterprise.1 Department of Health and Human Services, was $531 million. Although it is officially a nonprofit unit of the University of Texas, MD Anderson has revenue that exceeds the cost of the world-class care it provides by so much that its operating profit for the fiscal year 2010, the most recent annual report it filed with the U.S. The hospital’s hard-nosed approach pays off. When I asked MD Anderson to comment on the charges on Recchi’s bill, the cancer center released a written statement that said in part, “The issues related to health care finance are complex for patients, health care providers, payers and government entities alike … MD Anderson’s clinical billing and collection practices are similar to those of other major hospitals and academic medical centers.” That means the nonprofit cancer center’s paid-in-advance markup on Recchi’s lifesaving shot would be about 400%. The average price paid by all hospitals for this dose is about $4,000, but MD Anderson probably gets a volume discount that would make its cost $3,000 to $3,500. Recchi was charged $13,702 for “1 RITUXIMAB INJ 660 MG.” That’s an injection of 660 mg of a cancer wonder drug called Rituxan. On the second page of the bill, the markups got bolder. By law, Medicare’s payments approximate a hospital’s cost of providing a service, including overhead, equipment and salaries. Had Recchi been old enough for Medicare, MD Anderson would have been paid a few hundred dollars for all those tests. ![]() In all, the charges for blood and other lab tests done on Recchi amounted to more than $15,000. ![]() (In-Depth Video: The Exorbitant Prices of Health Care)ĭozens of midpriced items were embedded with similarly aggressive markups, like $283.00 for a “CHEST, PA AND LAT 71020.” That’s a simple chest X-ray, for which MD Anderson is routinely paid $20.44 when it treats a patient on Medicare, the government health care program for the elderly.Įvery time a nurse drew blood, a “ROUTINE VENIPUNCTURE” charge of $36.00 appeared, accompanied by charges of $23 to $78 for each of a dozen or more lab analyses performed on the blood sample. You can buy 100 of them on Amazon for $1.49 even without a hospital’s purchasing power. It read, “1 ACETAMINOPHE TABS 325 MG.” The charge was only $1.50, but it was for a generic version of a Tylenol pill. But it set the tone for all that followed. The first of the 344 lines printed out across eight pages of his hospital bill - filled with indecipherable numerical codes and acronyms - seemed innocuous. This is done to prevent tampering with the source material.The total cost, in advance, for Sean to get his treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy was $83,900. This is a common practice within government agencies, especially those dealing with sensitive information and with certain legal documents that need to protect certain information but need to reveal other information in the same document. Rather than editing the source file, it is the printed copies that go to non-privileged individuals that get redacted, i.e., the information that the said individuals are not privy to is simply blacked out so as to become illegible. An example is when a certain legal document needs to be distributed to people but not all of them have the right or privilege to view certain information contained in the document, and it must be kept intact for those who do. Redaction is often done on physical printed documents and not on the source files, so it becomes more like a post edit. Today, that meaning still holds true in a sense, but in a more "edit out," obscure or remove kind of way. Redaction originally meant to literally edit and make ready for publication, at least as evidenced by its usage in the early 15th century. ![]()
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