Stacy's reply about how parents will not be required to pay for donor milk
supplied by Prolacta leaves me with some questions.  Stacy, I don't know
what a 'carve out' is; I live and work in a country where absolutely nothing
is paid for out of pocket for any patient in hospitals as long as that
person is covered by a health care plan in the European Union or is a
registered asylum seeker or refugee, and there are no third-party payers
other than the national health.  The cost of operating a donor milk system
for babies is part of the cost of running a hospital here.  (Citizens of
non-EU countries must have insurance or pay for their medical care
themselves, and the costs are a fraction of what they are in the US, oddly,
since cost of living is supposedly so much higher here.)

If the cost of the milk is factored into the daily cost for the patient,
there must be some way of knowing what the cost is, and from my
understanding of the workings of hospitals in the US, someone will be
footing the bill.  I guess what I am wondering is what the vendor, in this
case Prolacta, is charging whoever it is who is actually paying for it,
because I am making the possibly mistaken assumption that they will not be
giving it to hospitals for free.

I can report that we have figured out that the cost of one liter of donor
milk costs about $100 here, when you figure in how much it costs to supply
the mother with a pump and containers, transport the milk, and then to test
each batch for presence of bacteria.  As many of you know we don't
pasteurize donor milk here in Norway, because so many of the vital
characteristics which make it such a life-saving thing are lost in heat
processing.  We test the donors more stringently than blood donors, and each
batch of milk is tested as well.

Does anyone here know how much Prolacta's products will cost?  Is it
possible to post that information to Lactnet?

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

  

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