Is 'Cookbook Medicine' Crippling the U.S. Health System?
By Christopher Moraff, AlterNet. Posted February 25, 2008.
The recent death of Nataline Sarkisyan exposes the tragic consequences of a health care system that values profit over patients.By now, the case of Nataline Sarkisyan has garnered so much media attention that there's likely few people who haven't heard the story of the 17 year-old California girl who died five days before Christmas after her insurance company refused to approve her liver transplant.
Sarkisyan, who was diagnosed with Leukemia when she was 14, was undergoing treatment at UCLA Medical Center when Philadelphia-based Cigna HealthCare ruled her much-needed transplant "experimental, investigational and unproven."
Sarkisyan spent three weeks in a vegetative state before Cigna bowed to pressure from the girl's doctors and offered to pay for the transplant itself. But by then it was too late.
Whether a transplant would have ultimately saved Sarkisyan's life we will never know. But that's not really the point. After all somebody has to say no; the problem, says David Senoff -- a Pennsylvania attorney who represents patients who have been denied care by their insurance company -- is that the people saying no are the very same people who profit from the answer.
"Health insurance by definition covers some things, and not other things it's the same as any other policy: there are some things that are in and some things that are out and somebody has to be the one who's outside of coverage; but you don't want those people who decide to be the ones who are in the company making additional money by denying care," Senoff said.
"The last person on earth that should be making a determination
is the person that's going to be making money off of the decision," echoes Steffie Woolhandler, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University. "No one that's involved in that decision should stand to gain or lose based on the decision." .......(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/77763/