mcjoan talked a bit about Jerome Mitchell's case against Fortis/Assurant, an insurance company, on the front page the other day. I've been posting about this case for a while, and I was surprised as anyone by the court documents that got released this week.
Jerome Mitchell was 17 when he applied for insurance with Assurance in South Carolina. In 2002, at age 18, he was diagnosed with HIV. His coverage was then rescinded, citing the fact that a nurse miswrote the date on a paper sent to the insurance company. He thought it was just a mistake so he tried to get back on.
HIV is an expensive disease that requires thousands of thousands of dollars of medication a year, and if he didn't find someone to pay for that, he had two years to live.
Well, he wasn't let back on his insurance, he sued, and he won a $15 million settlement that was later reduced to $10 million in appeals.
Lots of people have posted about the real death panels here at Daily Kos, and buried in this article is a paragraph that talks about the real death panels. This stuff's real.
Much of the trial record of the Mitchell case is bound by a confidentiality order and not available to the public. But two orders written by the presiding judge, Michael G. Nettles, a state circuit judge for the 12th Judicial District of South Carolina, of Florence County, describe the case in detail. Judge Nettles wrote the orders in response to motions by Assurant that the jury's verdict be set aside or reduced.
In the motions, Nettles not only strongly denied Fortis' claims but condemned the corporation's conduct.
"There was evidence that Fortis' general counsel insisted years ago that members of the rescission committee not record the identity of the persons present and involved in the process of making a decision to rescind a Fortis health insurance policy," Nettles wrote.
Elsewhere in his order, Nettles noted that there were no "minutes of actions, votes, or any business conducted during the rescission committee's meeting."
These people knew what they were doing was wrong. They knew that they were wrongfully denying people coverage, and they knew most 18-year-old kids on the individual market wouldn't sue, and if they did they wouldn't win. Who knows if the fact that Mitchell's African American or HIV-positive (still code for "gay" in many parts of the US) also weighed in on their decision.
I'd like to think that they were so ashamed of their actions they didn't want anyone to know the specifics of what they were doing, but it seems more like they wanted to protect themselves from liability as they were probably debating the chance he'd sue instead of whether or not he did everything right and should get the product he paid for.
Or maybe it's because their CEO is lying to America about what goes on at these death panels:
On June 16, 2009, the House Energy and Commerce Committee, held a hearing on the practice of rescission by health insurance companies, and among the industry executives who testified was Don Hamm, the CEO and President of Assurant Health.
Hamm insisted before the committee that rescission was a necessary tool for Assurant and other health insurance companies to hold the cost of premiums down for other policyholders. Hamm asserted that rescission was "one of many protections supporting the affordability and viability of individual health insurance in the United States under our present system."
He also suggested that those who had their policies rescinded by Assurant had attempted to intentionally mislead his company: "Unfortunately, there are times when we discover that an applicant did not provide complete or accurate medical information when we underwrote the risk," Hamm said.
The only mistake Mitchell made was assume that the nurse in question properly wrote the date, which he should be able to. No one here committed fraud, no one committed a serious error. When that was pointed out repeatedly to Assurant, they still wouldn't let Mitchell get the product he paid for. It took a lawsuit to get them to do it. This wasn't fraud on Mitchell's part or a mistake on Assurant's part - this was a targeted attempt to deny coverage to people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS since those people would be more expensive than their premiums.
He won $10 million. Assurant made $150 million from rescission between 2003 and 2007 alone. Unless there were lots of other suits against them for rescission, then they won the war despite losing this battle.
And it's a war against all of us, not just Jerome Mitchell. Mitchell probably would have applied for ADAP (funding for AIDS meds for low-income folks), which the South Carolina house just voted to end their contribution to. That would put him on the waiting list for federal funds, a waiting list that people were dying on in that state before South Carolina stepped in a supplemented those funds. His income would have to be less than 200% the federal poverty line, or $21,660 a year. Since the medication would cost him between $2100 and $4700 a month, he'd either have to keep his income very low or very high, or do what some working class HIV positive folks do - lie on the application and hide income.
I remember the first time I heard that death panel nonsense - I was bartending at a big golf tournament in one of the private chalets. One customer came up and said that he shouldn't drink anymore because Obama's plan would deem him too old and too useless to keep alive. I made some awkward answer about how if he was too old to work one day he'd probably be covered by MediCare, and he left. It was odd since the customers there were very wealthy people who worked for large corporations and none of them should have had problems getting coverage. It wasn't until I read about this death panel silliness that it clicked.
It was also odd to have a wealthy guy simply assume that someone like me, who was working events for a catering company and most likely didn't have any insurance, would oppose expanding access to health care. But that's the culture we have nowadays - everyone's the same class, having lots of money or no money or average money doesn't affect anyone's interests or ideology, and the elite's propaganda is supposed to be happily consumed by people who are getting fucked over in the current economic system.
Anyway, if I could talk to that guy now, and if I wasn't so busy at the time that I had a chance to say what I really think instead of looking to the next customer, I'd mention not just the death panels that private insurers use, but talk about how death panel-y they really are. If not recording minutes and participants in the death panels isn't just the metaphorical executioner's hood being put on, then I don't know what is.
Mitchell's dying or American workers are paying. Which is part of why the current system doesn't work - private insurers try to get the most expensive cases to be funded by the government. A more efficient system would just have everyone being insured by the government, which is why my advocacy (and I hope yours) for a single-payer system doesn't stop no matter what Congress ends up passing this time around.