In the United States — the country with the highest drug prices and overall health care spending among developed nations — Tiffany Ferguson fears her insurance company will stop paying for her cancer treatment. icij.org/investigations…
Ferguson, 42, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in January 2019. “My doctor showed me the scan and said, ‘This isn’t good. You either have tuberculosis or cancer,’ ” Ferguson recalled. “I remember praying to God that it was tuberculosis.”
Years of treatments — including chemotherapy, a stem-cell transplant and targeted IV therapy — held the tumors back, but they returned in 2021.
In March 2022, her doctor switched her to Keytruda, Merck & Co.’s blockbuster immunotherapy drug. icij.org/investigations…
After her first four treatments with Keytruda, she was in remission, meaning there was no active cancer.
“I remember sitting at the doctor’s office, looking at the clean scans [and thinking], I wish I had gone on [Keytruda] sooner,” she said.
Then one afternoon in July 2024, as she was sitting in the infusion chair, ready for her next dose, a staff member walked in and told her her insurance had denied further coverage.
The insurance denial was the beginning of a bureaucratic process that set her treatment back for weeks while Ferguson, her husband and her medical team exhausted nearly every option to fight it.
It wasn’t until early August that she received a call from her insurer and was able to schedule her next infusion.
Read Ferguson’s journey: icij.org/investigations…
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