My Health Insurance Denied My Cancer Treatment. I Emailed the CEO

polski-g

The cancer turned out to be more aggressive than was first surmised. Obviously, the insurance carrier was right to demand the aggressive, rather than "mild", chemotherapy.

mortar

https://archive.is/AIVji

tekla

Hell of a ragebait title. Insurance would pay for standard care of an aggressive cancer, not for something that was much worse at prognosis.

vivzkestrel

- if the solution was to email the CEO for every denial - how should the CEO handle this?

Molitor5901

It does help to be a journalist at a major magazine. Plebeians such as myself would be very lucky to get such a response.

whack

> Why did we consent to live in a system where the worth of our bodies and lives were so negligible as to be exchangeable for dollars? > polling showed that a third of Americans who had faced claim denials said they viewed Mangione positively. Some saw this reaction as sociopathic, but its extremity was the very point. How far must someone go in order to be taken seriously by those who adjudicate access to life itself? > there is no justification, ever, for denying a sick person care Everyone above is justified in their outrage, but they have picked the wrong target. For-profit companies exist for the purpose of making profits. They will never offer services that produce sustained losses. It's weird to blame the CEO for this - he's just doing what the shareholders hired him to do. Blaming the CEO for denying you healthcare is a bit like blaming a real estate agent for not giving away an empty house to a homeless man. You're better off blaming the shareholders for being selfish... but that too is a bit like blaming every single person you meet who chooses to buy an iPhone instead of putting that money into a GoFundMe for a sick patient. The real blame lies with the government. It is the government's job to give everyone a baseline level of healthcare. Taxes exist for the express reason of overcoming collective-action problems like the above. And yet, our government refuses to provide better healthcare, because a large fraction of voters prefer lower taxes over better healthcare access. if you're looking for someone to blame, blame them

ericmcer

I always wondered if this was as simple as reforming the insurance companies, or if the entire healthcare industry needed to be reworked. >> Medicare for All would prevent an estimated 68,000 unnecessary deaths a year. Are there doctors and specialists with the necessary equipment just twiddling their thumbs, wanting to help people but the insurance companies refuse to pay so they just sit idle? Or is our healthcare limited by supply? We might have to revisit a bunch of things like how doctors get trained/residency, what insurance should cover, public health around prevention, etc. rather than just saying "Give everyone everything".