Patient advocate
Patient advocate: A new pancreatic cancer treatment has proven to decrease mortality by 10% over the treatments currently available under your company’s insurance plans. Allowing doctors to prescribe the new treatment could save many lives.
Insurer: You fail to recognize that the new treatment is more than twice as expensive as the others. Including the new treatment in our plans would more than double our costs – and therefore dramatically increase premiums – while providing only marginally better care.
Which of the following is an assumption required by the insurer’s argument?
(A) Insurance companies should not value the saving of lives more than they value corporate profits.
(B) New treatments should only be included in insurance plans if they increase positive patient outcomes at a higher percentage than they increase costs.
(C) There is no affordable test to determine which patients’ lives would be more likely saved by the new treatment than by the old treatment.
(D) No other insurance companies offer the new cancer treatment in their insurance plans.
(E) The pancreatic cancer treatments currently offered by the insurer’s plans will not become more effective over time.
My Ques: What is wrong with option B? How is the answer C?
One line diagram will be below:
Patient Advocate: New treatment decrease pancreatic cancer >>>>>> Allow Dr to Prescribe
Insurer: C of N is more than twice of C of Old>>>> Lead to High Premium but marginally better care.>>> Not to be included in insurance plans
Easy POE:
A D, E,
If you review the option B it supports the Advocate not Insurer. “New treatments should only be included in insurance plans” ..
So the answer is C.
Explanation of Answer C: It supports the insurer as it talks in same line of marginally better care.
Hope it helps.
Hi Riya,
The insurer refutes the advocate’s argument by saying that the new treatment will cost more WHILE providing only marginally better care. The assumption he is making here is that the treatment will provide only marginally better care to all patients.
C points this assumption out. The insurer assumes that there’s no way of telling how the treatment will benefit different patients and that all patients will get only marginally better care.
B cannot be the assumption made by the insurer because he makes no such comparison between positive patient outcome and costs
