Guaranteed Healthcare

Dear Anonymous,
It is, in fact, the insurance company that is to blame. Hospitals and Doctors like myself provide enormous amounts of free and discounted care to needy, uninsured people. The reason our hospitals bleed red ink, are overcrowded and are forced into horrible decisions like this is because healthcare in this country is controlled by those that place profits before people. If your local hospital provides free care based only upon need, they could not afford to stay open to care for you or your family in your time of need. The reason your doctor spends only 4 minutes with you, looks harried, and "grossly overcharges" you for his time is that his reimbursement continues to be slashed by insurers, while the expenses of keeping his office open and competently staffed continues to increase. Simple math means you have to see more patients in the same amount of time to make ends meet. In fact, if insurers didn't aggressively and arbitrarily deny claims, your doctor could charge less, and rather than spend his time and money fighting them, he could actually spend his time caring for his patients.

Yes, let's place the blame where it belongs, rid ourselves of these parasitic insurance companies and focus our national priority on taking care of people in need, not allowing them to die for the pathetic reasons that rationalize insurance company profiteering.

The tragic part of this debate is the ignorance of those who simply lash out with little data to support their claims. I am an attorney who has practiced within healthcare for 25 years. The changes I have witnessed are profound. It is not incorrect to lay some of the blame for the mess we are in on physician compensation. In many ways, doctors helped contribute to the problem by grossly over-treating in a fee for service system that helped drive specialization and significant wealth generation by the physicians. But those days are over for any provider outside of plastic surgery, dermatology or the few other cash driven practices. The imposition of managed care is first and foremost a fight over money. After exerting little control over the system for decades, insurance companies, in essence responded with control that has completely altered the landscape. The real tragedy was that this was not "patient driven". The "health maintenance" notion is a sham. The insurance companies have simply said to providers, we are now in charge and we will dictate the terms. The notion of "experimental treatment" is just one of the mechanisms used by plans to protect the bottom line. Busy waiting rooms are the result of HMO's consolidating their panels by reducing reimbursement rates to the point where doctors have to choose either a high volume practice or get out of the business of taking care of insured patients. By the way, that $150 fee you paid is not set by the doctor. It is what the plan (insurer) sets as the rate for your visit. Physician compensation has declined significantly and many are just getting out of the business. Hospitals operate on very thin margins and I can tell you no one is getting rich. Finally, something not mentioned in the movie, nor anywhere in this website is the final insult and that is the ERISA pre-emption which bars lawsuits against employer sponsored plans, the vast majority of which cover patients. Not only have the plans set up a system of denials, they also benefit from a law which was passed in 1974 (which had nothing to do with health care plans) which may prevent the Sarkiysian family from holding the company responsible. Plans have poured millions of dollars into stopping any legislation to remedy this and the conservative courts have done everything to keep this pre-emption in place. Some reality based thinking and less emotion is needed in solving this. But if "anonymous" needs to blast physicians, oh well.

The ignoble reality is that private insurers bilk billions of dollars out of us and our health care system. They have no essential purpose in the system. These private insurers are middle men who rob us not only of our money but of our good health and at times even our lives because of their greed. That has to stop.

Anonymous stated: 'The insurance company does not decide if the operation will take place, they decide on payment.'

We pay our premiums to insurance companies so that in time of need we have coverage. That is our contract with the insurance company. Because the private companies are driven by profit they skew their pay-out protocols massively in their favor often denying coverage upon first request by health care providers. The more they deny, the more 'profit' they have. And in the end, they get rich; we get dead. Their decision to pay out or not directly effects the care we get.

And how do these decisions get made? Behind closed doors, by clerks and executives who have no bedside clinical knowledge and no real-time accountability.

We need to put the decisions back in the hands of the medical professionals who have the intimate details of and the personal relationships with the patients.

We as a society can decide in open debate, not in secret board rooms, what operations and treatments we will cover. Such openness is democracy at work. It is quintessentially American.

Our health care system is in crisis. Nataline Sarkisian's death is just one awful, heart-breaking manifestation of the crisis. The cure for this crisis is guaranteed health care for all. There is a bill in Congress ready to go: HR 676 written by John Conyers, Representative from Michigan. It is a single-payer system that would cover everyone, instead of leaving millions of Americans without, for the same amount of money that we are spending now.

We Americans pride ourselves on efficiency and innovation. A single-payer system uses most of its funds for actual care of actual patients, having about a 3% overhead cost. Compare that to the ratio private insurers operate under: they have about a 30% overhead cost. For efficiency's sake and for the sake of our well being, we must abandon the wasteful private insurance paradigm and move to the sane guaranteed single-payer system.

It will make us all proud. And will leave fewer parents with broken hearts and dreams.

if we have health care for all in this country. They will attack the ones who fight for it.

I have to ask...do we call the British, French, Germans, Swedish, etc. leaders and government Communists becuase of their national health care programs?

Those who appose it are spreading fear while people lose their homes and even die from our expensive and incompetent insurance for profit health care system.