I want to share a story I know is true. It makes me mad that the right wing mantra of "death panels" gets all the news, but real current day stories of people sentenced by the private insurance companies is rarely told.
One gentleman I know has had lung cancer for over a year. His doctor seems proud that he has controlled the cancer over that time, and even beaten it back using moderately expensive chemotherapy.
He was using 3 drugs, one of which was Avastin which costs between 5 and 6 thousand a treatment, the other drugs were Taxol and Carboplatin. The medical insurer paid for the drugs for a while, but used the occasion in the Taxol and Carboplatin combination (which after many months of success were becoming ineffective) to drop payment for the treatment entirely. All drugs, including the new substitutes were approved by the FDA for use.
Extending the patient’s life, as these drugs did, and we hope will do, was too expensive for the insurer, which had collected tens of thousands of dollars from the patient and his wife over the years but who now was costing nearly 20,000$ a month...
The gentlemen is in a very lucrative and huge risk pool. The company is making a large profit. As an insurer, it is probably much better than average. It is, however, their duty to their shareholders not to maintain at high cost customers who will eventually die anyway.
So how come the politicians are not screaming about The real Death Panels? Why is it acceptable to have an insurance company come between the doctor and the patient? The insurer has a contract which it is breaking. What did any of the screamers do about that?