Grief in the Wake of Victory

The Health Insurance Scam Breaks

Yahoo News issued a release on Thursday evening (December 20) from the California Nurses Association touting the victory of their joint demonstration with the National Nurses Organizing Committee and the Armenian community at the CIGNA insurance offices in Glendale, California, CIGNA Capitulates to Patient Revolt…

In a stunning turn around, insurance giant CIGNA has capitulated to community demands, and protests that the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee helped to generate, and agreed to a critically needed liver transplant for Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old girl in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center, says CNA.

Meanwhile, activists from all over the country were spurred into inundating CIGNA’s phone lines throughout the day after learning of the situation and protest on websites like Daily Kos, My Space and others.

Then came the sad news. Nataline Sarkisyan died of organ failure at around the same time of evening. She died because a bean counter at CIGNA Insurance overruled four of her physicians who advised – in writing as appeal for coverage denial – a liver transplant. They even had a suitable donor liver all lined up 6 days previously.

This might have been just another of the medical horror stories that seem to come depressingly often these days. Stories about what happens to the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance at all, and another 50 million whose coverage is ‘inadequate’ enough to be completely useless. It might be just another example of pencil pushers practicing medicine without a license and getting away with it instead of going to jail. It might have been just one more forgettable tragedy Americans could ignore because it’s too awful to contemplate. But that’s not what happened this time.

L.A. television news reported just 12 hours later that Nataline’s Father Blames Cigna in Daughter’s Death, and then it was announced that high-profile attorney Mark Geragos will be representing the Sarkisyan family. Geragos held a press conference to announce his interest and avenues of possible action against Cigna.

I think Cigna’s executives and the bean counters involved in denying coverage should be charged with both willful negligent homicide as well as practicing medicine without a license. I want to see them frog-marched off to prison, where counting beans won’t hurt anybody. I want to see a claim for punitive damages in excess of Cigna’s entire projected profits for the next year.

Geragos will do what he can, and we can all hope that what promises to be a very high profile case will at long last obviate the need for single payer health care in the United States. On the day of the massive protests and Nataline’s unfortunate death, the New York Times published an editorial entitled, Slowing the Rise in Health Costs…

The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation, issued a report this week analyzing 15 policy options for the federal government that could reduce national spending on health care by as much as $1.5 trillion over 10 years – even after spending more than $200 billion to provide health coverage for all Americans.

We can afford $17 billion for two or three months of war in Iraq, but we can’t afford basic health care for the citizens of the “homeland” these shrubberies tell us they’re protecting? How stupid do they think we are?

Here’s hoping this one doesn’t get buried beneath primary season hit jobs about Obama’s middle name, Hillary’s corporate connections or Mike Huckabee’s religious wingnuttery. This is one we should not forget…

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Filed under Economics, For-Profit Insurance, Health Care, Memorials | Comments (4)