Ebola care costs could exceed $100,000 per patient

U.S. doctors successfully treated one patient with ZMapp, a drug that has not yet been approved for sale in the United States and has not yet been priced. Drug companies could provide some Ebola drugs for free or at a reduced cost, or the federal government could help pay for the drugs, to help prevent a public health emergency. 

Health insurers use to protect themselves against the threat of catastrophic disease outbreaks. Aetna (NYSE:AET), for example, has protected itself against catastrophic losses by working with Vitality Re Ltd., a special-purpose vehicle in the Cayman Islands that funded reinsurance arrangements by selling health-linked notes to investors.

Employers with self-insured plans often use stop-loss insurance — insurance that protects self-insured plans against catastrophic losses.

Insurance policies, self-insured plans, reinsurers and stop-loss providers often exclude coverage for experimental treatments.

In the case of Ebola, insurers and self-insured plans might decide to pay for experimental treatments, but, in that case, the plan managers could find that the reinsurers or stop-loss providers will still want to enforce the experimental treatment exclusions in the reinsurance or stop-loss contracts, the Lockton analysts say. 

Kaiser reported that the typical self-insured plan with 1 to 199 employees has an attachment point, or stop-loss deductible, of about $134,000. For larger employers, the average attachment point is about $328,000. For 2014, for individual qualified health plans (QHPs) covered by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) reinsurance program, the attachment point is just $45,000.