Huh? I’m not following how it’s incompatible. I expect my insurance company to deny my cosmetic breast reduction surgery, but to pay for the break reduction surgery that removes my life-threatening cancer.
And “life is sacred” doesn’t mean, “can’t allow a person to die when their time has come.” Lots of people who believe in the value of their own lives choose hospice when that seems like the best choice.
I mean, “sacred” is a squishy concept. But in an ideal world, health insurance would support the sacredness of human life. IMHO, speaking as a retired actuary who is comfortable with insurance.
Thanks. I think some folks might be taking the idea of “sacred” far too literally. In the context of the Blue sky thread I linked to, it just means that people are treating human life very seriously as a good in itself, not as an annoying variable to be set aside in the interest of maximizing profit.
Heaps? I don’t think so. Not much more than CEOs in other industries. Or anyone else profit motivated who will stay within the law.
He was an unexceptional representative of the American CEO. Who in turn are not motivated much differently than many others whose actions impact fewer, for good or ill. Most others likely.
People get a bit upset when they’re trying to not be sick, in agony, or dead. So while all insurance is to some degree grudging and slow, it’s particularly irksome for medical coverage.
Let’s at least clarify how things work. A denial is often done based on following a set of standard guidelines. Individuals of course have different circumstances than the simple guideline. A denial can be appealed. It is a hassle for all involved but often goes to a next step of physician to physician per review. Frustrating as the reviewing physicians often are no longer actually practicing physicians. A denial upheld can then be appealed upwards to a medical director and sometime to a QA/UM committee.
Yes the hurdles are cumbersome. The system is extremely flawed. But that does not mean just approving everything and anything with no questions asked is a great alternative.
I’ve had experiences with medical CEOs and not infrequently have had the thought that someone could use a good slap upside the head. I get that. But unlike Will Smith I have self control.
Fallacy of excluded middle. There are a lot of other action options between (or sideways of) the two actions of murder and letter-writing.
The correct approach would be legal change through political action. This would require a huge amount of effort, strong leadership, and at least a modest number of honest politicians (huh, I was able to type that 2-word phrase without my keyboard bursting into flames). I can just about imagine a scenario where this might happen: the completely clueless actions of some unnamed presidential administration, combined with insane reckless greed at the corporate level, gives us an even Greater depression than we had in the 30’s. Out of the rubble, anger, and despair might come some solution for US health care.
The moral condemnation may lead the political discussion that would make it possible to establish proper oversight so that we’re not dependent upon the moral senses of greedy sociopaths.
Herein lies the crux of the problem. One of the central points of reaping zillions in net profit is in order to be able to use that money to buy politicians, to push laws that faciliate your own business. What large businesses do is often questionably ethical (at best), but they have the capital at hand to knead the law into something they can stay within and still be irresponsible.
If very wealthy people are “evil”, this is one key reason. Wealth is power, and power is the key ingredient of “evil” (if such a thing exists objectively).
I don’t know how it works in an ideal world but in the real world you or your employer pay X dollars to be covered up to Y dollars in damages or expenses, where Y > X.
If you go over Y (fairly) no amount of arguing about the social construct that life is magical in an ideal world will convince a for-profit business to pay for your or my chemo. I’d expect, at least. The employees of that business depend on it to support their families.
Insurance contacts vary, but many have no upper limit, or such a high limit that they aren’t met. I know several people who have racked up more than $1M in health insurance benefits.
This is the core problem with capitalism. You can’t convince a for-profit business to lose money, no matter how righteous the claim. The legal fiction that is a corporation would stand by and watch you starve to death rather than give you a crust of bread, because they could make 2 cents off of it on the open market. Corporations are inherently amoral, they don’t care, they can’t care, and expecting them to care is a fool’s errand.
The only way to make them care is to make them care, or at least use the power of the government to make them take actions that are superficially similar to caring. Such as, if your health insurance customer gets sick, you’re covering their sickness, even if it turns them into a money losing customer. You’re not canceling their policy, or denying their legitimate treatments, you’re paying for it, or you’re not going to be in the health insurance industry at all.
I might (?) go a step further and opine that – to the extent that the cost of an insured’s (annual or lifetime) health care does correlate with the severity of their illness (not necessarily mortality; even considering ‘only’ morbidity) – the greater the cost, the less humane the caps functionally are.
No it’s not. It’s fair (in theory), it operates under market conditions and it maximizes the efficiency of the system to distribute resources (health care, in this case) that are limited (assuming both parties behave ethically). Now there may very well be a disparity in power or cartelization or whatever that should be corrected, by regulation or other means. But there is nothing inherently unfair or wrong abut denying coverage under contractual terms where it may lead to an “untimely death”. Forbidding a business to work like that (as immoral) would represent a net social harm.
Umm, why are we basing what’s fair for the insurance company on a single insuree? Shouldn’t we be looking at what they have to pay out vs what they take in across all of their insurees?
There is a thought-provoking collection of novellas by Cory Doctorow called Radicalized, and this incident uncannily recalls the plot of the title story, to the point where I found the similarities jarring.
From this review
Long spoiler below
In “Radicalized,” the third story, the country is aflame and in chaos after people are fed up seeing their loved ones die unnecessarily in the medical system. They begin to riot, build bombs and conduct mass executions in medical insurance offices The hero of the story is Joe, a white 36-year-old who works in a well-paid but pointless corporate job.
Even with his top-of-line medical insurance through his company, when Joe’s wife develops cancer, the insurance company refuses to cover her treatment.
A frustrated Joe gets slowly involved with the violent element at large in the country taking revenge on the pharmaceutical, insurance and medical establishment. Joe is arrested. He is asked to give up the names of those he communicated with. He refuses just as his wife’s cancer goes into remission. She visits him in jail and lets him know that a comprehensive medical care act has been passed. She tells Joe, “Who says violence doesn’t solve anything?” .
I didn’t agree with the point of the story, which was “Violence sometimes works” but it was very thought provoking. I am, however, very interested in seeing how the real life story plays out,
The idea that violence never works is one of those great lies we like to tell children. It might not work all the time but to say it never works is wrong. Sometimes violence is the only practical solution.
