Guaranteed Healthcare

By Donna Smith

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania --  When the day began, I sipped coffee with Hilda and Krikor Sarkisyan of Northridge, California,  in a hotel restaurant as we waited to go confront the Cigna executives who denied their 17 year old daughter’s liver transplant.  Nataline died last December.  As this day closed, I sat across from an RN who was crying with sadness and rage for the Sarkisyan’s loss and the absolute horror of what we experienced together in the Cigna lobby today.

If ever we needed proof of why the for-profit health insurance industry cannot be trusted with our health and well-being, we saw it today.  We saw today the cruelty; we saw today all the reasons why we cannot trust that which we know we cannot trust.   The lack of human compassion and the outright obscenity of the broken system have somehow codified into reality for us all a pattern of delays and denials of care that never can be reversed.  Allowing a child to die – someone else’s child – has somehow become acceptable behavior, and we have allowed chronic abuse of our trust to flourish and to be explained away by insurance executives who cannot tell the truth.  

At Cigna, we walked into the lobby and moved toward the elevators that led to the inner sanctum of one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies. Though Cigna security held the line as Hilda and Krikor protested and demanded an audience with the CEO, H. Edward Hanway, the company sent down their PR guy, Chris Curran, to do their dirty work and to put off our protesters – the grieving parents and their nurses.  They were ringed now by many of the same nurses of NNOC and CNA (and now PASNAP) who had held them together on the day last December when Cigna allowed their daughter to die as the company first denied and then safely – for their revenue side, anyway – approved the needed transplant too late to save Nataline. 

During the protest today we all looked up to see a group of people looking over the mezzanine railings above us.  They must have been looking down at us during the whole protest.  Hilda called up, “Do you work for Cigna?”  And suddenly what we saw was too horrific to be believed.

By Donna Smith, community organizer 

SAN FRANCISCO -- The nurses of the California Nurses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee do much more for patients than bedside care and patient advocacy.  These amazing fighters give the patients bruised and battered by this broken healthcare system a voice in the darkness. 

And today, as many patients joined the nurses' march across the Golden Gate Bridge, the honesty and courage nurses often show to their patients in their most vulnerable moments transformed into a gift of dignity and shared purpose.  Together, nurses and patients called for guaranteed, single payer healthcare for all.

Above you see Hilda Sarkisyan, mom of the late Nataline Sarkisyan -- the beautiful 17-year-old girl who died after her insurance company first denied her liver transplant and then reversed its awful decision too late to save her life.

I'll never forget the story of Nataline Sarkisyan, a young 17 year-old, LA youth who had a real chance at surviving her leukemia diagnosis.  Having started my professional nursing career on a hematology/oncology floor at UCSF, leukemia patients are the most challenging, yet rewarding patients to take care of.  One mistake, one delay, even as much as an hour, can mean the difference between life and death.  These patients and their families are true champions and heros in my book.  Nothing got me more angry than the story of this young teen and her un-necessary fight with her insurance company, CIGNA.  She and her family would eventually win their battle, but in the end it was too late.