Rationing Health Care to Keep Wall Street Happy

Having spent the past four days in Washington, I’ve been “treated” to a stream of commercials from the unfortunately named “PUN (Patients United Now).”  The one that they’re betting the bank on, and which echoes talking points from Frank Luntz and the deliciously odious Rick Scott, shows a Canadian woman who apparently had a serious bout of cancer.  Her treatment was delayed, and she nearly died.  Presumably she went elsewhere to get care, but the story in the commercial is pretty vague.  What is clear is the warning that President Obama may soon be ushering in Canadian-style health care to the U.S. I suppose this means all cancer patients will instantly have their scheduled chemotherapy and radiation appointments delayed for months.  (Freakin’ Canada!)

It’s a scary – if vague – story.  But if you want terrifying stories of denied care, Canada ain’t got nothing on us.  Here in the land of the free, health care rationing is alive and well and being used to keep shareholders happy.

Let me just quickly say, I can think of a handful of single-payer advocates who had to get arrested because the decision-makers in the Senate were determined to avoid discussing Canadian-style health care like the plague.  If that’s the president ushering in Canadian-style health care, he’s got a funny way of showing it.

But to get to the root of the matter, if you want scary stories of care being unjustly denied here at home – pull up a chair.

We have Robin Beaton, the former nurse from Texas, who had her cancer treatments delayed for months by her insurance company’s rescission policies based on an error in her records, during which time her tumor grew catastrophically.

Eleanor Hinton Hoytt has a similar story:

“Never again should there be another Esmin Elizabeth Green, a forty nine year-old child care worker die alone, ignored, stepped over in the floor of an emergency room after waiting 24 hours for care that never came.  We should not have that happen in this country.  That poor, black, immigrant woman without insurance, forty nine years old, mother of four, Gospel singer, sat there… and sat there in the Emergency Room.  And then she fell.  And then she was lying there.  And they still ignored her.

“It’s not just.”

On Wednesday, Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna, took the scary stories of denied and delayed care a step further.  His testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee laid out plainly the insurance industries’ strategies for solving the “medical-loss ratio” – the process of decreasing how much you pay out in claims compared to how much you take in for premiums.  This allows the industry pay for its high administrative costs and, of course, profit and return on investment for what Potter called, “a Wall Street-run system that has proven itself an untrustworthy partner to its customers, to the doctors and hospitals who deliver care, and to the state and federal governments that attempt to regulate it.”

But let’s pause for a second.  First, as Ezra Klein says, “The industry literally has a term for how much money it ‘loses’ paying for health care.”

Second, Potter detailed how the industry reduces its “losses” through rescission and jacking up rates for the sick.  The first involves “look[ing] carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment.”  The second involves hitting policies for people and businesses likely to need a lot of health care with “intentionally unrealistic rate increases.”  Apparently pushing sick people out of coverage is good for business and fabulous for your stock price.  Actually treating too many people can cause your stock to drop so fast that it can cause a company-wide panic.

That means there are thousands of Robin Beatons out there by corporate fiat.  And if they can’t find affordable insurance from Cigna and other Wall Street-driven insurers, they might go on to be an Esmin Elizabeth Green.

So here’s the question, PUN and all would-be PUNs out there.  We understand you’re against a government-run system that looks nothing like what’s being proposed in Congress where either through medical error, bureaucratic inefficiency or inherent inferiority of government management causes a cancer diagnosis to be missed or an unspecified treatment to be delayed.

But how can you be for a Wall Street-run system where the cancer diagnosis and serious ailments that we find are reason enough to cancel someone’s health care in their hour of need?  If you’re against rationing because of bureaucracy, how can you be for rationing for the sake of a one-day bump on the stock market?

(Photo credit:  TGIGreeny on Flickr.)