Word: transplanter
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...appeal wound up on the desk of Dr. Ossorio, who again denied coverage. The deMeurerses, committed now to getting the transplant by any means necessary, launched a two-pronged attack: they authorized Hiepler to pursue an injunction to compel Health Net to pay for the treatment: and they began fund raising in earnest. Christy's sister organized a formal dinner in Boulder, Colorado; friends and colleagues arranged a school talent show. The deMeurerses' daughter Michelle, then eight years old, took a piece of loose-leaf paper and with shaky precision wrote her own advertisement for a yard sale. The sign...
...found that Christy had indeed responded to the initial chemotherapy, the deMeurerses signed an agreement of their own with UCLA, promising to pay up front the full cost of the treatment: $92,000, an amount equal to 0.08% of the $11.7 million that Health Net had accumulated in its transplant pool...
Soon afterward, Health Net's Ossorio telephoned Glaspy's boss, Dr. Dennis Slamon, the division chief of oncology at UCLA, in what the deMeurerses say was an effort to influence whether the center would perform Christy's transplant. Health Net's Lyle Swallow disputes this charge: "The idea that Health Net could somehow muscle UCLA into doing anything, given their size, given their reputation, given their budget, is really kind of laughable...
Ossorio identified himself to Slamon and with little preamble asked whether UCLA was still in accord with Health Net's guidelines. Slamon said yes. Then why, Ossorio asked, was UCLA going to transplant a Health Net subscriber named deMeurers...
...Slamon says he made the decision to pay for the transplant after discovering that Christy by then had already undergone the initial marrow harvest. "We should not have taken her halfway into the stream without being prepared to take her all the way across," he says. He insists that the decision was his alone, and not the result of any coercion from Health...