http://www.omaha.com/article/20090824/NEWS0802/708249996Froma Harrop: Real ‘death panel’ occurs when coverage is rejected
“Death panels”? I’ll tell you about death panels. My husband faced one some years ago, and it didn’t involve any government bureaucrat. It was run by our private insurer, the sort of corporate entity that foes of health care reform say will give you anything you want.
My husband was diagnosed with liver cancer. We were “insured” by a private-sector insurer. Here was the deal: You had to use doctors on its list, but if you needed specialized care outside the network, the insurer’s health-maintenance or- ganization would pay for it. Fair enough.
A liver expert within the network said point blank that for my husband’s case, there was but one place to go, a specialized chemotherapy program at Deaconess Hospital in Boston, only 50 minutes away.
But the insurer refused to pay for it. Instead, it directed us to a small, local hospital unequipped to deal with this kind of cancer. Our liver specialist warned, “Don’t waste your time.”
We naively tried to go through the company’s appeals process. We would call and speak to a handler who said our case would be reconsidered. Days later, a one-sentence letter would arrive by slow mail saying that we were being denied and that we should call this number to challenge the verdict.
Around and around we went. We could never speak to anyone making the decisions. No one would even talk to our doctor, who at one point whispered to us, “Mortgage the house.”
I became convinced that the insurance company was trying to run out the clock on my husband’s life. Had it issued an outright “no,” we would have gone to Deaconess, paid for the care ourselves and fought the insurer later. But it always pretended that a possible “yes” could be around the corner.
Having already lost precious time confronting this cancer, we simply rushed to Deaconess. On hearing the story, the head of the chemo program told us: “HMOs don’t care whether you live or die. They just want to save money.”
My husband underwent the arduous chemo. Meanwhile, powerful people were pulling strings for us with the insurer. Upon learning we had “connections,” the insurer finally said it would pay.
The cancer came back. This treatment was never a sure thing, but I wonder how much the delay affected the outcome.
A former Marine, my husband was a tough customer. Toward the end, he said to me, “You know, fighting the insurance company was worse than fighting the cancer.”
A year after my husband died, I was still receiving medical bills for some of the treatment that the insurer had agreed to cover. Oh, the company eventually paid. The game is to break you down.
What we wouldn’t have done to have traded our insurance company CEO’s minions for a government bureaucrat. The bureaucrat would have given a simple “yes” or “no” based on official guidelines. He or she would not have had a personal stake in denying you care.
By the way, a government-run program doesn’t tell you what treatments you may or may not have. It tells you what the taxpayers will subsidize. You are free to go out with your own money and buy whatever you want. We would have been prepared to do that. Instead, we got tied up in a private insurer’s web of tricks.
Believe me, “death panels” already exist, and they have nothing to do with the government.
Contact the writer: fharrop@projo.com