A jury in Oklahoma awarded the Cunningham family $25.5 million after a four-year court battle with insurance giant Aetna. Orranna Cunningham began the lawsuit, and her husband Ron finished it. Orranna’s doctor prescribed her stage 4 cancer treatment in 2014, but Aetna denied her insurance. Aetna argued that the treatment—proton beam therapy—was “investigational and experimental” in treating Orranna’s nasopharyngeal tumor. The Cunninghams mortgaged their home and started a GoFundMe page to pay for the treatments while Orranna began the lawsuit against Aetna. Orranna died at the end of May of 2015.
Orranna’s tumor was so close to her brain stem that doctor’s felt the best treatment would be to use the more finely tuned proton beam therapy, lessening the chances for more severe side effects that traditional radiation therapies would have inflicted. CNN reports that jurors cried during the announcement and said that they hoped Aetna would see this as a message. Aetna’s lawyers, according to Ron Cunningham, are proof positive why the private insurance industry represent the real “death panels.”
Cunningham had another encounter in court. He said Shely, Aetna's lead attorney, walked up to him and congratulated him after the verdict before telling him he'd lose on appeals.
Just think about that. Aetna didn’t comment on the trial or the jury’s award. According to the jurors, the case the Cunninghams’ attorneys were able to make was rock solid in comparison to Aetna’s defense. Aetna’s medical directors admitted to insane workloads, including handling “80 cases a day,” and the medical directors who took the stand admitted they had spent more time preparing for trial than they had on Orranna’s case. All in all, every single person from Aetna said that they did “nothing wrong.” But they did.
Aetna’s shitty attorney will likely get some kind of reduction in the jury award. He will point out how far afield from other awards it has been. He will be paid handily, and he will convince himself that hey, he doesn’t make the laws, he just twists them into the most expensive pretzel he can sell. But the people that win cases like this don’t want the money. They want their loved ones back.
"As far as the money, I'd give it all back to spend just one more day with her."
There will always be sad and terrible stories of medical malpractice and bureaucratic negligence. But a system cased in escalating profits is designed to create have-nots. And in the case of health insurance, have-nots is the difference between life and death, and a more peaceful transition into whatever it is that awaits us.
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