This is an opinion piece, but it’s by someone who was an industry insider. Pretty much confirms what I’ve observed as someone who administers Section 125 Flex plans for a living, as well as being consumer of medical care myself.
At a county fairground in Wise, Va., I witnessed people standing in lines that stretched out of view, waiting to see physicians who were stationed in animal stalls. The event’s organizers, from a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical, told me that of the thousands of people who came to this three-day clinic every year, some had health insurance but did not have enough money in the bank to cover their out-of-pocket obligations.
That shook me to my core. I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was playing a leading role in a system that made desperate people wait months or longer to get care in animal stalls, or go deep into medical debt.
My dad told stories of frantically searching for the magic word to get treatment approved. He spent half an hour on the phone, once, pleading for life-saving treatment for one of his patients. He finally mentioned that the man was bleeding, and suddenly the nurse gatekeeper said, “of, he’s bleeding? Then i can approve it.” It was a condition that always includes bleeding. My dad was furious.
I don’t know how many people actually die due to insurance refusal-to-pay, but I’m willing to bet it’s not zero.
To be a bit obnoxious, having been on a committee that refused to authorize an out of network service based on patient preference when there were very qualified providers within network, refusing to pay is not telling them they can’t get that care. It is stating that the insurance won’t pay for it. Yes full retail is often crazy expensive but it actually is possible to negotiate to get discounted rates out of pocket in some cases.
I am however sure you are correct that there is some non-zero number of cases in which a family could not afford out of pocket and went without care that might have been lifesaving. Of course I am also that that fatal delays of care for other reasons, even in single payer systems, have a non-zero number of deaths resultant. And that housing prices being as high as the market will bear leaves some on the streets with deaths as a result. And that gun CEOs are culpable for many gun deaths. And that highly processed foods being cheap and everywhere leads to deaths.
I could likely with a modest amount of effort find some evidence supported estimates for those items. A modest amount of effort was unable to find any such evidence based estimates for deaths due to insurance denials or delays, though.
In contrast I don’t think we’d get the public celebration for even the murder of a gun manufacturer CEO, or a junk food producer’s killing, or a developer in a gentrification zone being executed.
But here and elsewhere the claim that thousands died each year as a result of the UHC CEO’s decisions goes fairly unquestioned, and many celebrate his execution, cheer on the proverbial leopard eating his face …
I’ve had weird conversations asking doctors to go ahead and prescribe a drug that they thought i needed, but that wasn’t going to be covered by insurance, because i was willing to pay for it.
Honestly, i suspect the Canadian system, where it’s the doctor who isn’t paid, rather than the patient getting billed, that results in more “treatment doesn’t happen” cases. But I’m pretty certain it happens under our system too.
But you are right. The usual outcome of our bad health insurance system is that families go bankrupt, not that anyone is outright killed. And that is a good point to bring up.
I will mention that i personally knew a woman who decided not to treat her breast cancer because treatment only had about a 50% chance of whatever survival metric she was looking at (this is a long time ago, before ACA) and treatment would impoverish her family because her health insurance turned out to be much less than she had thought it would be. But I’m pretty sure that kind of thing is a whole lot less common with ACA, where all the plans actually cover major events with some kind of out of pocket max.
I don’t think this is because those deaths don’t exist, it’s because “death due to insurance denial” is a multi-step process, and has to be investigated individually before you can place a death in this category. You can find anecdotes, but turning them into data is a lot of work.
Both of those groups have higher mortality because they fail to get treatment. If we are to believe that people who fail to get treatment due to insurance denials are somehow different, that’s the part that needs evidence.
The man’s execution is being widely celebrated as justified, so many claim because he is responsible for deaths by the thousands. Maybe there should be some burden of proof?
But of course it is bullshit. The anger is more based on frustration many of us have dealing with insurance, and in general looking for a someone to blame. And yes of course there is plenty to be angry about. As @puzzlegal notes we are much better off as a society since ACA but it still is crap.
Each month families in my practice have to do scavenger hunts to find somewhere that sticks the stimulant that has been effective for their child’s severe ADHD, and not being available is not enough to get an override for a medicine outside of formulary that is in stock. Maintenance inhalers are not being made in enough supply so the trying different versions to find one in stock is a new regular thing. It took me two weeks of futzing to find one covered and in stock for myself after years of good control on QVar. I’m not brittle but some asthmatics are. Will there be celebrations when the leopards eat the face of a Pharma person?
In terms of years of life lost in this country insurance executives are not the biggest villains, way behind a long list, who meet burdens of proof.
People are frustrated with their lives and there is specific irritation with getting what they need from healthcare. This man was faceless to them and was rich. So yea! He’s dead!
The man was the head of a company who, along with heads of other similar companies, have for decades ensured that the market for critical services is structured so that regular people experience misery, dread, and ill health.
Americans routinely fail to get the health care they need, routinely are bankrupted or otherwise desperately burdened financially, and routinely live with the stress and difficulty that is placed before them at the behest of rich people like Brian Thompson.
Whether or not people can name or prove X people have died specifically from decisions made by Thompson is beside the point. The people who own and run that industry have been sucking Americans dry for decades, profiting from our misery, and using their influence to make sure it doesn’t change.
Assassination isn’t a strategic plan to fix health care, it’s the reaction of a disturbed person who sees what’s happening and decides to do something.
I think that’s a huge part of it , that he’s faceless. And I say that because of a few times I’ve heard people complain about insurance companies when it wasn’t clear that the issue was entirely the insurance company’s fault. I knew someone who would complain to me all the time that her daughter had to pay a doctor out of pocket because he was out of network and her insurance wouldn’t pay the entire bill. But it wasn’t entirely the insurance company’s fault that the doctor was neither in-network nor would he just accept the insurance payment as payment in full. And she looked at me like I had two heads when I said that most likely it was the doctor’s choice not to be in network and definitely his choice not to just accept the insurance payment.* She wasn’t going to be mad at the doctor, he wasn’t faceless.
* Pretty sure it was a solo practitioner but even if not , there was another entity at least as much to blame as the insurance company. But the doctor was the face of that entity.
Oh hell yes! If Martin Shkreli were to be gunned down, people would applaud.
Or maybe not. His “crimes” on pharmaceutical pricing were long enough ago that the probably response now would be “Oh, yeah, I remember him.” His true criminal crimes… (from Wikipedia)
So he’s out of jail now. How long before Trump offers him a cabinet position?
Why? It’s not like there will ever be an investigation into the matter. Both because obfuscating responsibility is part of the design of the system, and because it’s legal to kill thousands or millions of people for corporate profit so there’s nothing to investigate, legally speaking.
There’s no point in demanding something that will never be available.
Everyone who is 1) saying that violence is wrong and 2) that healthcare reform should not happen is saying, in essence, that needless deaths of thousands of people for profit should continue.
Eric Adams and an entire freaking platoon of NYPD perp-walked him this morning as if they had just captured the Joker. I’m not sure what this was supposed to accomplish aside from making our boy look like the baddest motherfucker on the planet.
Yeah, as best as i can tell, the CEO of United healthcare was not the source of the problem. He was relatively new in the role, and anecdotally, he was trying to reform the company, at least to some extent. At any rate, as a recent insurance company employee, my initial reaction to his death was shock. But if Martin Shkreli is gunned down, as soon as someone reminds me who he is (I’m bad with names) i will celebrate. He’s why capitalists can’t have nice things.
For once I wish a mayor or governor would have the integrity to say out loud, “I am proud that my city and state’s corporations kill people for profit.”
The current issues with medication shortages that I listed have nothing to do with either of them. One of the current C suite Pharma people. Because they are rich. And there are medication shortages clearly resulting from their greed and sadism.
