Case Study St. Jude's Hospital

St Jude's children's hospital was founded by Danny Thomas, Danny Thomas was a struggling entertainer. He prayed to St Jude's to show him his way in life. In return, Danny told St Jude he would build him a shrine. Danny became famous and decided to build a children’s Hospital named after St Judes. At first St Jude’s was supposed to be a general children’s hospital. Danny Thomas enlisted a group of businessmen to help him. Danny decided to make it a cancer hospital because at that time the survival rate of childhood cancers was 20% and children with a common type of cancer called Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia better know as all was only 4%. Danny’s idea was to build a hospital who would not only treat patients, but also where they could do research
Jude, patients are treated on disease specific clinical protocols which provide state of the art treatment while generating new insights that will improve the cure rate of these diseases. Now let's look at St Jude. 1 No patients pay. 2 Most patients are tied into research.3 St Jude's dose massive fund raising. 4 They have made more finds in treating cancer with higher survival rates than any where in the world. How can they do this and keep costs down when health care costs so high and why are the survival rates higher than other hospital, can other hospital do this. Let's start with cost. First most in insurance won’t pay for newer treatments on the market. The cost of surgery for most cancers for one person runs at the lowest $14,000 at the highest $56,000. The average cost of chemotherapy for 1 month is $13,000, 6 months $61,000, for 12 months 102,000. Radiation therapy for 1 month is $13,000, for 2 months $24,000 and for 3 months $35,000. This does not include medicine, time off work not only for the patient but caregivers, travel expenses, the cost of insurance plus copays. The average cost of a cancer drug is $100,000 dollars a year. It has caused patients to file for bankruptcy. The drug companies say it cost 1 billion dollars to bring a drug to market. Let's do the math if a drug cost 1 billion dollars to bring it to market and 1 cancer patient pays $100,000 a year for that drug, the drug company needs 10,000 patients a year to make the money back. Every year 12 million new people are diagnosed with cancer. If 12 million people have cancer and pay 100,000 dollars the drug company makes 1,200,000,000,000. Drug companies are not regulated they can charge whatever they want. Is part of the answer to pass laws to make drug companies lowers the cost of the medicine. Lets look at health insurance. If you are single and in good health you will pay about 346 a month. If you have a family plan it can cost about 647 dollars a month. Lets look at a single