$2.4 million. $1.5 million. $2.28 million. These are the amounts of money the health system where I work, teach, and receive health care spent purchasing a PET scanner, a CT scanner and a three-month supply of pembrolizumab, a drug that treats a variety of solid-organ cancers.To meet the clinical – read “market” – demands of patients, who are typically disinclined to wait for diagnosis or treatment, UVA Health already owns seven CT scanners that I know of and three PET scanners, which are used to detect small deposits of known cancer. It also has enough “pembro” to treat all patients who will or might benefit from it. Guess how much of their costs are billable to insurance?Zero.In my dual roles at the University of Virginia, as both associate chief medical offi
