The paper you linked to is hardly proof that US insurance companies routinely pay hundreds of thousands for GBM treatment. It's a very narrowly focused descript

The paper you linked to is hardly proof that US insurance companies routinely pay hundreds of thousands for GBM treatment. It's a very narrowly focused description of what it cost Excellus BlueCross/BlueShield, the sponsors of the paper, to treat 88 patients insured by Excellus. They try to suggest that excluding data from "national datasets" improves the quality of the research. > The patient cohort involved 88 patients with over 44,000 separate insurance claims. This dataset represented a happy medium that is large enough to provide a good estimate of overall patient costs, but small enough to individually verify each patient diagnosis and treatment rather than relying on administratively coded national datasets. It's marketing disguised as scientific research that tries to justify the high cost of health care by claiming that those costs, and commercial insurance, are strongly correlated with higher survival rates. > Healthcare payments for HGGs patients were substantial and such high healthcare expenditures were positively associated with patient survival and commercial insurance. Translated: our costs are high, and so are our customer's premiums, but it's worth it because patients last a few extra months compared to the inferior Medicare options. Private insurance companies don't just fight their customer's claims, they fund "research" that "proves" anything other than private health insurance is worse. Then there's those 88 patients. With a median age of 59, and a median KPS score of 90, they're cherry picking patients who, would, statistically, survive the longest.