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Biotech / Medical : IMAT - ultrafast tomography for coronary artery disease -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tim C. Lienau who wrote (2360)	4/7/1998 1:35:00 PM
From: stock bull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3725

Tim, there is insurance coverage for the CT Scan, although its spotty. For example, Blue Cross of CA covers the procedure if you have a Doctor's referral for the scan. If you self refer, no coverage. I would think that most Doctor's would refer patients for the scan, However, there are many Doctors who still don't believe in the procedure as they "don't know what to do with the calcium score". This is a bunch of BS. For example, I had the scan, received a poor score, saw a Doctor at UCLA for followup studies and received a prescribed course of treatment. Hope this info is of some help. Stock Bull

To: Tim C. Lienau who wrote (2360)	4/8/1998 12:27:00 AM
From: Steven Durrington	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3725

Can't answer the specifics of your question, as (shock horror!) I am not an American, and am not familiar with your health care system and insurance schemes. As a general principle, a test which is a sensitive screening tool, for early changes associated with developing problems, is a good thing for private health insurance companies, especially if it's for a common disease. Early degenerative changes can alert the patient and/or physician to start a treatment regime and to make positive lifestyle changes before the onset of significant disease. From the Insurer's point of view, it's better to spend 10's of millions preventing heart disease, than billions on treating advanced cases which require expensive medication, surgery and/or long term hospitalization. Heart disease kills about 50% of us in the western world, with another several percent thrown in for other vascular problems (strokes, pulmonary emboli, renal hypertension/failure etc.). It's economically viable and preferable to prevent or delay heart disease in 1/2 the population than to allow the disease to progress unchecked, and the costs of screening 100% of the population would pay for itself many times over. This wouldn't be true in cases of screening for rare diseases that have little economic impact on the community, unless the screening tool is very cheap (e.g. Mantou [SP?] test for Tuberculosis, newborn infant heel stick test for PKU) But here, we're talking about CT scan procedures which cost a couple of hundred, up to several hundred dollars each. I think though, that the high percentage of positive results and the preventative medicine that could be practiced would favour mass population screening using these techniques and I would imagine that your health insurance companies could be convinced to support such a programme, if not for humanitarian reasons, at least for the hard, cold, bottom line savings that would be made long term. Hope that's somewhat useful. Durro