December 23, 2007 6:20 AM

Why you never hear "corporate" and "humanity" in the same sentence

CIGNA to be sued for manslaughter or murder in death of girl

Family of dead teen to sue insurer that dallied on liver transplant

You heard that right, folks. A seventeen-year-old needs a LIVER TRANSPLANT and the insurance company is making up their mind whether to pay for it.

This story represents everything that’s wrong with our current health care “system” today. When a 17-year-old girl cannot get a life-saving liver transplant because her insurance company says “(&^% you” to her and her family, something is horribly, irretrievably wrong. And it’s not as if CIGNA’s inhumanity and lack of compassion is an isolated incident in the health care industry. If it were, we could hang the people responsible for such a criminal absence of compassion and call it a day. No, the problem is a cancer (a pre-existing condition, no less) that has spread throughout the entire industry. I cannot believe that as a nation we can be happy and satisfied that considers the bottom lines of corporations to be primary over the health and well-being of those they “insure”. What if Nataline Sarkisyan had been your daughter? Would you care then?

Nataline Sarkisyan deserved to have the opportunity to live. CIGNA decided that they didn’t want to make the investment. When they finally succumbed to intense public pressure, they’d waited and dawdled for so long that Nataline Sarkisyan had in effect been handed a death sentence. CIGNA got their victory, albeit a Pyrrhic one, because now they’ll be facing legal action and a shitstorm of negative media attention. Nataline Sarkisyan, who might just have had a chance at life if CIGNA hadn’t refused to cover her liver transplant, died because she was refused a medical procedure that would have saved her life. I don’t care how you parse Ms. Sarkisyan’s case; what happened to her is inexcusable, criminally negligent, and borders on premeditated murder.

I’m not going to turn Ms. Sarkisyan into a martyr, but if her case doesn’t make a convincing argument for a single-payer health care system, I don’t know what will. How many more people need to die from corporate greed before we create a system that puts patients first- and not corporations?

Or are you really OK with someone else’s child dying? As long it’s not one of your loved ones, the status quo works just fine, eh?

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on December 23, 2007 6:20 AM.

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