Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

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easypeasy
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Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by easypeasy » Fri Aug 05, 2016 12:34 am

I'm here on a student visa, and I have Swisscare student health insurance for up to EUR500,000. I just had an abdomen scan two weeks ago, which revealed a growth in my kidneys. The doctor said further testing is needed, but it is most likely cancerous (due to the specific location of the growth, and the fact that I had blood in my urine as well) and I'll most likely need surgery. Does anyone know if cancer treatment is covered for students here in Finland? Anyone with experience with Swisscare, specifically cancer treatment? I don't have much information from my doctor at the moment, and I'll talk to him again soon, but I just wanted to see if anyone had similar experiences?

I don't want to return to my home country (USA, please don't attack me for being American) for treatment, despite the fact that my family is back there. This is because my sister who went through a different cancer treatment(yes, we are a cancerous family) earlier this year had a lot of trouble with the bureaucracy of American health insurance. I know that bureaucracy exists everywhere, but this is a special level of hell. Basically, the doctor's office outsourced their billing and insurance authorisation; the tests were done by another company which also outsourced their billing; and the insurance company themselves outsourced their billing. Therefore, any mistake in billing or any change required took at least two weeks to resolve, unless she personally called each and every party to resolve the issues, sometimes she had to take two or three days off to drive around to collect paperwork and drop them off personally. On top of that, after the treatment was completed, she was constantly hounded by billing agencies for bills that she's already paid, but somehow were still marked unpaid. She's now in debt of almost a million dollars (not exaggerating, she was in the ICU for 3 months because her immune system had to be destroyed and rebuilt, and that was not cheap!)

Forgive me if this isn't the forum for such a topic, but I'm feeling kinda stressed out and needed to rant.



Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

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Flossy1978
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by Flossy1978 » Fri Aug 05, 2016 9:29 pm

Sorry to hear you are ill.

Why not ring the insurance company and ask them?

Read the paperwork you got when you signed up to the company.

Obviously you might not be able to study while being treated. So you might want to be careful about losing your resident permit, if you can't show you've not done enough schooling. Not sure the Government cares about the reason you haven't fullfilled your obligation.

I don't think it is any cheaper to be treated for cancer anywhere much in the world. It just depends on who is paying.

Good luck. Hope you get better.

P.S It is a resident permit, not a visa. A visa is just for visiting, in Finland.

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rinso
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by rinso » Sat Aug 06, 2016 6:30 am

You seem to worry more about administrative problems than about your health problem.
Get your priorities in order. Worry about a (possible) billing mix-up later.

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wolf80
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by wolf80 » Sat Aug 06, 2016 11:16 am

Sorry to hear about your condition.

I would be careful with the insurance company, they are the ones who have to pay for the treatment, so naturally they are not on your side. And especially cancer treatments can be long and expensive, and they won't like it. I would check online a bit how they normally treat customers and especially cases expensive for them. Then you should check your sentence by sentence to check that you did not violote a single term of their conditions, that would allow them to get out of paying for your treatment. Then you should report it to them (also look if there is a time-frame for reporting cases in the conditions).

It could be that in case they are not cooperating you will have to hire a lawyer to get to your right. It can be that the insurance company is nice and cooperating, but it could also be that they don't wanna pay. Then you need someone who knows how to get you your money.

rinso wrote:You seem to worry more about administrative problems than about your health problem.
Get your priorities in order. Worry about a (possible) billing mix-up later.
That is easy to say! Nobody wants to get healthy and be in debt seveal hundred thousand Euro! Especially if it could have been prevented that the insurance company is not paying for it!!

betelgeuse
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by betelgeuse » Sat Aug 06, 2016 3:58 pm

easypeasy wrote:Does anyone know if cancer treatment is covered for students here in Finland? Anyone with experience with Swisscare, specifically cancer treatment?
If you are here for studies less than two years, the insurance is required to cover it for a student residence permit. For studies expected to last at least two years, you will get a municipality of residence and the treatments are covered by the public sector and the insurance is only required to cover medication. In the case that your policy covers it, please help Finnish economy and make them pay for it even if covered by the public system.
Flossy1978 wrote: Obviously you might not be able to study while being treated. So you might want to be careful about losing your resident permit, if you can't show you've not done enough schooling. Not sure the Government cares about the reason you haven't fullfilled your obligation.
There is a category of residence permits if it's not possible to return due to temporary medical problems. I would hope that they would take medical situation into account when looking at study points. If they don't, there probably would be good grounds to appeal.

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Beep_Boop
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by Beep_Boop » Sat Aug 06, 2016 4:59 pm

betelgeuse wrote:I would hope that they would take medical situation into account when looking at study points. If they don't, there probably would be good grounds to appeal.
From the experience of multiple students I knew, it seems that they're quite lenient when it comes to study credits when it comes to student residence permit if you can show valid reasons for not doing well in school. Cancer surgery would most definitely be a valid reason.
Every case is unique. You can't measure the result of your application based on arbitrary anecdotes online.

easypeasy
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by easypeasy » Sun Aug 07, 2016 2:33 am

Thank you everyone for your comments. All your comments have been very helpful and have given me something to think about. I'm still feeling shocked and having a hard time processing, so I haven't decided what to do. Initially, I had planned to stay here after finishing my studies, so I am also afraid that if my treatment is going to take a long time, it will affect my studies one way or another. Maybe it's just better to get treated back in the US so I don't have to go through this alone. So many concerns ... I'll have to talk to my family, the doctor, and the insurance company, get more tests done, and see how it goes.

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Piet
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by Piet » Sat Aug 13, 2016 10:11 pm

Sorry to hear of your temporary diagnoses, however keep up the faith, it might be just kidney stones, if not, be happy you got two kidneys, taking one out will not affect your life, most likely no chemo needed and depending of the biopsy of the possible tumor, maybe some hormone pills are all you need.

As long as it is not very aggressive and you have no metastases, no worry. Just need a checkup (ultra sound scan or MRI scan) for the next 10 years every half year (to check for new tumors).



Good luck!
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sotka_
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by sotka_ » Sun Aug 14, 2016 1:13 pm

Piet wrote:Sorry to hear of your temporary diagnoses, however keep up the faith, it might be just kidney stones, if not, be happy you got two kidneys, taking one out will not affect your life, most likely no chemo needed and depending of the biopsy of the possible tumor, maybe some hormone pills are all you need.
Good luck!
Based on the OP's description, those are hardly kidney stones, no point in giving false information here. A CT-scan would tell you right away if those were kidney stones, which are dime a dozen and no one would mistake those for a tumor.

There are benign kidney tumors as well as cancerous ones, unfortunately cancerous ones are more common. Some tumors can be identified with ultrasound or CT, biopsy often helps identifying the rest, but some can only be identified after surgery.

Treatment depends on multitude of factors, but in many cases, the default treatment is the removal of either the whole kidney or only the affected part of the kidney (+ a margin). In case of renal cell carcinoma, neither radiation therapy nor chemo is used (metastasis might be treated with radiation therapy, though).

I do not want to tell you what to do and where to get treated, but thinking about your financial future, which would result in least amount of debt: your family member(s) visiting Finland while you undergo your treatments, or you being treated back home?

Hope all goes well.
"Elämme kovia aikoja, ystävä hyvä."

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browndude
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by browndude » Sun Aug 14, 2016 8:58 pm

I am sorry to hear of your situation. While the whole healthcare billing system in the US is a colossal !"#¤% in need of a violent revolution, the treatment available in the US for cancer is at the leading edge-I was a research scientist in the US and I studied in a university next to what is supposedly the world's best cancer hospital. This coupled with the fact that you have family in the US who would care for you, makes me think that you should go back to the US for treatment. At the end of the day, good health and family means a whole lot more than money.
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easypeasy
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by easypeasy » Wed Sep 21, 2016 1:17 am

Hi everyone! I thought you guys might appreciate an update on my situation. First of all, I would like to, again, thank everyone for their comments. You guys were all incredibly helpful and kind, and I felt really supported by a bunch of strangers on the internet! I did return to US for treatment, as I needed the support if the treatment does stretch out for longer than expected. Fortunately, I'm still under 26, so I'm still covered by my parents' health insurance in the US. My family lives in San Diego, so I first visited my family doctor to get the ball rolling on treatment. But I did encounter the bureaucracy that I was afraid of. They re-did the abdomen scan, but the doctor took a week to get back to me with the results (even though the nurse who did the scan said that the results would be ready by the end of the day). Next, I had a lot of trouble scheduling an MRI as there always seems to be trouble with the paperwork. After two weeks of unsuccessfully trying to get an MRI done, my aunt in the San Francisco area suggested that I get treated at UCSF, as the cancer treatment there is supposed to be the best in the world (ranked after the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota), so I moved up there to live with her and tried to schedule an appointment with a physician at UCSF. But the next available appointment was over a month away, so they scheduled me to meet with a nurse practitioner(NP). My family was apprehensive about meeting with an NP instead of a "real" doctor, but the NP was fantastic! She was sympathetic, competent, and very responsive. She scheduled an appointment for me to get an MRI the next morning, and she called me with the results later that day, which revealed that the kidney mass is consistent with renal cell carcinoma. When there were problems with my health insurance billing, she had her office manager call my insurance company to straighten it out. It was a vastly different experience from dealing with a family doctor, whose office seemed to be struggling with medical codes and authorization bureaucracy. I met with the urologist the following week, who scheduled a CT scan the next day to determine if surgery could be done with laparoscopy or if it had to be open surgery. The CT Scan revealed that the kidney mass was wrapped around a major vein running through the kidney, so to be safe, it had to be open surgery, which takes longer to recover, and of course, with more risks. Surgery was scheduled for the following week. I spent 4 days in the hospital, and was up and about within the week. sotka_ was right that no chemo is needed for kidney cancers. Chemo is needed only if the cancer had spread to the other organs. The kidney mass was sent off to be looked at, and the pathology report came back after a week, which revealed that the mass was a Stage T1a, Grade 2 clear cell kidney carcinoma. The urologist managed to preserve half of the kidney and kidney function, which is good. A week after I was discharged, I was attending the local wine and food festival, and I'll be back in school in Finland by the end of the year!

So that's the good news. The bad news is that, before my surgery, I've already received the first claim rejection from the insurance company, stating that the CT scan was unnecessary and the insurance would not cover it. The day after surgery, I received another email from the insurance company stating that they would cover only 3 days of hospital stay, instead of 4 as recommended by the urologist. I looked at my medical billing history, and the MRI (which usually costs around USD $1,500 or according to time.com, an average of USD $2,611) was billed at a whooping USD $6,035.00!!! But my insurance company gets a "member rate" of USD $3,083.89, whatever that means! The kidney surgery itself cost USD $6,127.00, lasting over 5 hours, and with a team of 10+ doctors, including the anesthesiologist team! I can't imagine how a 20-minute MRI could cost as much as a 5-hour open abdomen surgery!

In conclusion, I'm glad I went back to US for treatment, but I'm sure the bills would be trickling in over the next few months, with some errors, some over-billings, and I'll have to make calls to get them all sorted out, maybe pulling my hair out in the process. I'm glad that my cancer was the "easy" kind that was resolved with one surgery. For my particular case, I believe it would have been the same treatment in the US or in Finland. In response to browndude, I think you are right that treatment in US for cancer is better for some cases (or maybe most?), as most of the experimental trials begin in the US. But in all fairness, there are bad doctors in the US too (and everywhere else), with the added frustration from the billing process. I'm not sure if that would be fixed in the near future. The system will have to get really bad first, in order for it to get better, and there are still a lot of people defending the health billing system in the US because it's been working well for them. It would really take a trifecta of bad luck (job loss + medical emergency + not being able to make payments = crippling debt) for anyone to see that the system is messed up. Sorry for getting philosophical, but the fear of crippling debt from a medical emergency is a very real one in my mind, and one that would probably drive me to stay and retire in Finland.

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browndude
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by browndude » Fri Sep 23, 2016 9:18 pm

I am happy to hear of your favorable outcome. Your experiences regarding the billing situation is sadly not uncommon. When I was in the US, there were two types of situations where I had the feeling that I was being conned, the first was when I went to buy a used car, the second was whenever I had to go to any type of medical facility. The who setup is one big scam with far too many middle-men push. The system will collapse soon enough because now even the doctors are sick of it. In fact, this was one of the main reasons I did not envision myself living in the US in the long-term.
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easypeasy
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by easypeasy » Wed Sep 28, 2016 1:37 am

Thank you browndude! I think the doctors suffer the most, aside from the patients. The health insurance system has created a lot of bureaucracy to give doctors a hard time, so they can reject claims for reasons of "insufficient information".

NicoleDeng
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by NicoleDeng » Wed Sep 28, 2016 9:17 am

thank you your tips

inkku
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Re: Cancer treatment in Finland (as a student)

Post by inkku » Wed Sep 28, 2016 9:52 am

easypeasy, you are very courageous, all the best to you!


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