Dan Klein on the Growing Role of Charitable Organizations Like PAN Foundation

Charitable organizations are seeing more and more patients who need financial assistance, said Dan Klein, President and CEO, Patient Access Network (PAN) Foundation.

Transcript

More people are getting insurance, but plans are also shifting more financial burden to patients. Have changes like these resulted in any changes that you’ve seen from your end of providing financial assistance to patients?

We’re seeing more and more patients with high-deductible plans and more patients in Medicare who are reaching the catastrophic threshold. And, as a result, we’re seeing more demand for the types of grants and assistance that we provide. The numbers just seem to grow every year, and it’s a challenge to keep up.

We mainly serve Medicare patients—so about 85% to 90% of the patients we serve are on Medicare. As a result of the Affordable Care Act rolling out, obviously more people did get coverage, but those aren’t really the people who generally come to us for grants. Now, what’s potentially change is, one, people are coming off the Affordable Care Act coverage because of the changes that the new administration has put in place and, also, there’s this new emerging trend of something called accumulator adjusters that may make manufacturer coupons less useful for patients with commercial coverage. So those patients might start to look to charitable foundations like PAN for assistance. So, we could see an increase as a result of that.