The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the U.S. agency in charge of Medicare, announced yesterday that it has scheduled a meeting to discuss the coverage of Dendreon’s prostate cancer vaccine Provenge. The meeting has been scheduled for this November 17. […]
A member of the advanced prostate cancer on-line support group who is the wife of an advanced prostate cancer survivor in New Mexico just informed us that Trailblazer (the MAC that controls New Mexico reimbursements for Medicare and Medicaid) has said they will not pay for her husband to get Provenge. They were also told [...]
There has been a lot of questions raised about why the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) has out of the clear blue, launched a review of Provenge, a review that could ultimately make Provenge unavailable to men on Medicare and Medicaid (see the post:Medicare Funding for Provenge, We Urgently Need Your HELP). There [...]
Mike Scott who writes the THE “NEW” PROSTATE CANCER INFOLINK today published an excellent summary/discussion about survival time for men with metastatic prostate cancer. He presents a synopsis about anticipated survival going back to the late 1980s and brings the conversation up to our current condition. He reminds us that our next big step will [...]
How are funding decisions made for Medicare and Medicaid? What drugs are to be funded? These questions have recently come to our attention as many of us have attempted to have Medicare fund our use of Provenge. The administration of Medicare is actually broken into 15 different regions, or MACs (Medicare Administrative Contractors). Each MAC [...]