One insurance victim too many?
I worry about a lot of things where my children are concerned. In the back of my mind, I've thought about what would happen if one of them was critically ill and my health insurance company refused to pay for a life-saving procedure-- and let her die--to make their quarterly numbers. In other words, to increase profits for their shareholders.
Thankfully, my kids are in great health, but that nightmare scenario appears to be one possible explanation for what happened to Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old California girl who died after the health insurance division of Philadelphia-based Cigna Corp. denied her a liver transplant earlier this month. As often happens when the press gets involved in a care-denial case, Cigna subsequently reversed its decision and said it would pay for the operation and follow-up care, but by then it was too late to save her.
This case has caused revulsion across a large spectrum of American society. Check out the comments on the Cigna message board on Yahoo! Finance. The American public has had it up to here with this sort of cold-hearted, profit-driven denial of care. The Sarkisyan family's well-known (and accomplished) attorney, Mark Geragos, who like them is Armenian-American, has urged the Los Angeles County DA to file criminal charges against Cigna executives involved in the care denial. Film maker Michael Moore, whose film "Sicko" chronicled a number of similar cases involving care denial by insurance companies, has also called for a murder or manslaughter prosecution.
That might be the only way to stop this sort of thing. Investors didn't punish Cigna for their cruel treatment of young Nataline--its stock is up slightly since the story broke on Dec. 21. The Sarkisyan family's expected lawsuit against Cigna will likely succeed and result in a large judgment, which will be covered at least in part by liability insurance. The only thing that can scare corporate executives sufficiently into changing their ways is the threat of being put in prison as a felon.
The political ramifications of this case could also be huge, in part, sad to say, because the victim was a white teenager and not a poor black child. White victims just get a whole lot more public sympathy in America than black ones do.
As Michael Moore notes in his statement on the Sarkisyan case linked above, all of the President candidates save one--Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich--favor keeping profit-driven health care as part of their approach to national health insurance. But you can see where the need to make profits in health care takes you. It costs a lot more, and you get dead children like Nataline Sarkisyan whose care costs more than Wall Street is willing to pay. I'll say it again: we need a national health care system like France has, paid for out of general tax revenues and covering everyone.