Word: transplanting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Glaspy, still unaware that Christy was a Health Net subscriber, agreed that a transplant was an option. If she wanted it, he said, she could have it. "In the part of medicine where there are uncertainties," Dr. Glaspy says, "I think we have a sacred responsibility to explain those uncertainties to patients, and we also should allow them to use their values and where they're coming from to pick among the treatment options that are rational." He could not wholeheartedly recommend a transplant in her case, he says, but a transplant "was on the rational list." First, however...
...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...
Still, nothing could have prepared him for his latest, and possibly greatest, fight. It took more than a year and some intense lobbying for Getty to win the right to become the first AIDS patient to receive a baboon bone-marrow transplant. He overcame the last bureaucratic hurdle in August, when the Food and Drug Administration agreed to allow Getty, and Getty alone, to undergo the procedure. Then in the fall, he developed potentially fatal pneumocystis pneumonia, which postponed the transplant until December...