Cell therapies, in which a person’s cells are taken out of their body, sent to a drug manufacturer and modified to target certain other cells in the body, for example, cancerous ones, and then put back in the body to do their job, are expanding rapidly and are quite expensive. They are even more expensive when hospitals buy the finished product from the manufacturer and mark it up a bunch. An analysis of the cost for a cell therapy for lymphoma finds that when done inpatient, Medicare paid an average of about $589,000 for the treatment, while on an outpatient basis it was about $529,000. Beneficiaries pay part of that difference. This difference is something Medicare could change by insisting on paying the same thing across all settings that a treatment is performed in. As you might imagine, hospitals will use the inpatient route if they can, since the revenue is more, although I suspect the profit margin could be higher in an outpatient setting. (Cell Therapy Analysis)
