The human cost of health care

I have been thinking quite a bit about the recent news stories about Nataline Sarkisyan, the 17 year old from Northridge, CA who died after for her health care insurer denied the claim to cover a liver transplant. CIGNA insurance originally denied the coverage of the expensive operation after having approved coverage of a bone marrow transplant and a kidney transplant. A team of doctors requested that CIGNA cover the transplant operation to replace her rapidly failing liver. CIGNA denied the request early in December, calling it, "experimental, investigational and unproven." Nataline's doctors appealed to the insurer that a transplant was not a lark but a necessity to save the girl's life. After much public pressure to reconsider the case, CIGNA reversed its decision more than a week later but time had run out. Nataline died just hours after the insurance company approved the transplant.



Now there are a lot of news feeds and blogs out there shouting about this story. Some of the ink is speculative, some of it is spin and some of it is probably just sheer propaganda using the Nataline story to advance someone's agenda, just like Terry Schaivo was used as a political football by some congressional and right side of the bus christian hacks back in 2005. Nataline's case was even more tragic than just some political extremists using an innocent victim to advance an agenda. Nataline Sarkisyan's life was pitted against corporate profits and of course the artificial entity with all the rights of a human being, but none of the responsibilities won out over the 17 year old girl.



The bottom line in Nataline's story was that the US healthcare system is broken. It is wrapped in bean counter bureaucracy and right wing red tape. Conservatives cry that "socialized medicine" is an evil concept and will diminish the quality of American healthcare. Well this was an example of the "market efficiency" of private, for-profit healthcare. Which would really be worse? Insurance company greed or bureaucratic fuck ups. Either way, innocent die for no good reason. America has the most sophisticated healthcare technology in the world today but that technology is being withheld from more and more Americans every day based on their ability or inability to afford it.