By VANESSA FUHRMANS and LAURA MECKLER
January 7, 2008; Page A1
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Edwards getting some flack about this incident where her family has come out in support of him which should be no surprise as he has been fighting on this front for some time.
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John Edwards has been bashing big health insurers in recent days with the story of a girl who died waiting for a liver transplant. But the details of the case suggest the Democratic presidential candidate may be oversimplifying the tale.
Nataline Sarkisyan had been battling leukemia for three years. Insurer Cigna Corp. rejected coverage for a liver transplant, then reversed its decision and said it would pay. The 17-year-old died before the operation could take place.
By pushing the case so hard on the campaign trail, Mr. Edwards is raising the emotional tone of the debate on health care, which has already emerged as perhaps the leading domestic issue in the campaign. Mr. Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton are among the Democratic candidates attacking health insurers.
"We need a president who will take these people on," Mr. Edwards said at the Democratic presidential debate Saturday night. He said Nataline "lost her life a couple of weeks ago because her insurance company would not pay for a liver-transplant operation."
Nataline Sarkisyan, who died last month.
In New Hampshire yesterday, the candidate's wife, Elizabeth Edwards, put her arm around the girl's mother, Hilda, before Mrs. Sarkisyan spoke at a campaign rally.
Cigna defended its handling of the case. "I'm perplexed that this has become a campaign issue," said Jeffrey Kang, Cigna's chief medical officer. "It is highly unlikely that any health-care insurance system, nationally or internationally, would have covered this procedure." (bs and nothing to support their claim about that).
Insurers are highly unpopular with many doctors, who complain about insurance-company bureaucracy, and with patients who don't like having medical claims denied. Left-leaning critics of the U.S. health-care system say it isn't appropriate for some insurers to be making billions of dollars in profit while tens of millions of Americans go without insurance. They would prefer the "single payer" type of system in many European nations, where the government takes the leading role in paying for care.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119967240787671395.html?mod=hps_us_inside_today