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Are heath insurance companies death panels?
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There has been way too much ridiculous, time wasting, rhetoric about “end of life counseling” leading to “death panels” lately. What is ironic to me is that it seems that in our current health care system the insurance companies are death panels, as they decide who gets treatment and who doesn’t. So in effect they sometimes decide who lives & who dies. Sounds to me like what all these demagogues are ranting about.
My cousin, Steve recently died after a very courageous fight against brain cancer. His wife, who is a breast cancer survivor, is now having a hard time getting insurance for her teenage girls & toddler son because “there is a history of cancer in the family.” What is wrong with our system that this kind of thing happens? To want to fix a broken system is certainly not Nazism as a recent “town hall American” ridiculously proclaimed it to be, it is just doing the right thing.
The health insurance industry definitely needs reform; there is no doubt about that. To reform it is not communism or socialism, to fight for it to remain the same is sheer stupidity. When I hear these “leaders” & “patriotic citizens” talk about how it will become socialized medicine like
I haven’t so I can’t comment on their systems; however I am not I advocating socialized medicine. My father was a general practitioner and then an ER physician. I do believe that doctors should be paid well for what they do.
However what do the insurance companies executives do to deserve the huge salaries that they make? They make far more than doctors. They are paid based on how much money they save. They save that money by denying claims. How is denying a service, a service? Who benefits other than their shareholders? As usual it is simply a case of the middlemen taking the lion’s share of the money for doing nothing. Thosee are the people that Ayn Rand criticized as they perform no real service and simply make money off of the people who actually contribute to society.
Then I also hear the cries that what drives costs up is simply malpractice insurance and what is needed it tort reform. Yes malpractice insurance does drive costs up. Doctors order unnecessary tests to cover themselves so they don’t get sued, etc. I heard a stunning statistic on the news recently that eighty percent of the malpractice cases are against the same twenty percent of doctors. Why are these doctors still practicing? Why is this area not being reformed? Are doctors malpractice insurance rates based on if they have had previous cases against them?
Yes there is negligence in the health care system. David Goldhill’s recent article in “The Atlantic” http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care) is very insightful and raises a lot of good questions. Only once in his career did my father ever face any type of malpractice claim & it was dismissed. There was negligence, but not on his part. He had ordered a blood transfusion for a patient. The nurse in charge of the transfusion was nearing the end of her shift. She had the transfusion sped up as she wanted to get off duty. The patient died as a result. She lost her license & rightly so.
During his campaign & inauguration Obama spoke change being necessary and that we would “all have to make sacrifices.” He’s right. Some people may have to cut back on eating twinkies & drinking so many soft drinks. Some people may need to get up off the couch & go take a walk. Some people who work in the medical profession may need to re-think what they are doing for a profession & re-commit to providing a service for others. And sadly some of those health insurance CEO’s & their cronies may need to sacrifice the huge amounts of money they make for doing absolutely nothing other than stamping the word “Claim denied” across a piece of paper.
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