Breaking the Bank to Heal the Body

Let's talk money!

So how much does a nice long case of lyme set you back? And are some protocols more expensive than others? That's the question today as we open our section of the survey on finances.

I asked people in the survey to give me ballpark numbers of how much they think their protocol costs each month. This was a bit tricky for some, because many people with insurance never see the details of their actual bills, or if they do, these numbers are skewed because insurance companies are charged less for many treatments than self-pay patients would be.

The bottom line in this example is a procedure that would cost someone who pays out of pocket $1,500. The insurance company would pay $400 for the same procedure... that's right, the uninsured pay over 3X for the same procedure as the insurance companies do.

Thus, it is very hard to get a sense of what the "true cost" of any procedure would be. It is also incredible how biased the system is against poor (but not quite poor enough to be on government assistance) people, who are the least likely to have insurance coverage and are paying the largest bills.

This also means that self-pay patients have some wiggle room (heck, I'd actually call it a right) built into the system to be able to negotiate your medical bills. Many hospitals now have a sliding scale payment structure for their clients, which does some of the "negotiation" for you. Here's a website with handy tips on negotiating bills.

Finally, this is a great website by a doctor who is trying to bring all of this to light. He shares what he struggles with in making decisions about how to relate to both patients and the insurance industry, as well as explains coherently the basic way all of this is set up.
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Given the unsettled nature of what medical procedures "really" cost, we have a bit of an apples and oranges issue with the question of asking people to estimate their medical expenses. For instance, the self pay people probably have a better handle on what their things cost (since they are forced to actually read and pay the bills directly) but they are also going to report the rates as inflated compared to someone who reads detailed insurance bill reports.

Still, I did ask, and this is what the survey yielded:

According to this website, "Health care costs for people with a chronic condition average $6,032 annually - five times higher than for those without such a condition." That's just a little over $500/month, and presumably includes everything.

Hmm... just our treatment protocols alone seem to put us into that ballpark 38.5% of the time, with 25.8% of us spending at least twice that much. That's not counting testing, practitioner appointments and emergency room visits (such a weirdly polite word for what that is, isn't it? "Visit" hardly seems appropriate to describe the experience of going to the ER with lyme.)

More to come in later blogs about other expenses. But for now, let's just note that chronic lyme is a depressingly expensive habit, even among chronic illnesses.

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Keeping in mind that we also probably have a lot of overlap in our non-core protocol elements (how many people do you know with chronic lyme who aren't taking probiotics, for instance?) there is a noticeable difference in the average cost of our protocols.

Here's what people reported:

The general summary here is that antibiotics are the most expensive way to treat lyme, and rifing is the least expensive. Now there are of course plenty of nuances here. Rifing (and the runner up in the least expensive category, energy healing) is unlikely to be covered by insurance, where antibiotics are the most likely. And who pays makes a big difference to how affordable things feel.

(And yes, I say that even knowing that a lot of people get turned down for long term antibiotics. I still think they are more likely to be covered than anything else on this list. Ever tried talking your insurance company into covering your shaman's fees? Or purchase of a rife machine? Unlikely.)

Second, there's a huge difference in cost between an antibiotic protocol that only uses oral doxycicline (a cheap pharmaceutical if ever there was one) and IV antibiotics.

Finally, it is unclear to me if all of the rifers spread out the cost of their machines over what they expect to be the lifetime of their treatment or just ignored that when reporting the monthly total. It is only a fair comparison if the cost of the machine (and electricity) are factored into this somehow.

Still, for those without insurance, this will be a good data point to consider as you sort through what is possible for you.

I think what most of us would ideally like is to have our health care costs be manageable, have choices in what types of medicine we have, a minimum of administrative hassles, and assurance that we won't be dropped because our circumstances have changed.

THAT would be the health care plan I imagine we could all get behind. Unfortunately, for most of us, we don't even get one of these, let alone all four.


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Let's look at one more chart for the day in order to reasonably compare protocol costs. I'll give you the doctor expense totals in the next blog, but I wondered if there was a cost discrepancy by protocol in doctor visit expenses. Here's the chart that sated that scrap of curiosity:

There are a handful of people spending over $1,000/mo on practitioner expenses in each treatment protocol category, though the least for the folks using rife machines and homeopathics. Almost all the rifers, in fact, spend less than $500/month.

So again, rifing looks to be the least expensive way to treat chronic lyme disease, which validates one of Bryan Rosner's main points in his books on treating lyme: that rifing is a financially accessible approach to treatment.

There's more, of course, than money involved in our treatment decisions, but it also isn't a factor we can afford (pun intended) to ignore. Hopefully these bits of information will help.