USA Media Totally Blows - They Really Are America's Enemy

Yes, death panels do exist. They exist inside the big health insurance corporations that every day make decisions on whether or not people enrolled in their health benefit plans will get the care their doctors believe might save their lives. I know this firsthand from nearly two decades inside the insurance industry.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask Hilda and Grigor Sarkisyan, who very possibly would be helping their daughter, Nataline, plan her 21st birthday about now had a corporate medical director not refused to pay for a liver transplant Nataline’s doctors believed would save her life.

Nataline was diagnosed with leukemia at 14. Initial treatments were successful and the disease went into remission. It came back a couple of years later, though, and the sort of treatments she’d had previously were not working. She had to have a bone marrow transplant, which weakened her liver. In mid-December 2007, her doctors at UCLA Medical Center said she needed a liver transplant. They asked for prior approval from her insurer, CIGNA, to pay for it. Nataline’s doctors said they believed she had at least a 65 percent chance of living five years or longer if she had the procedure.

A CIGNA medical director 2,500 miles away in Pittsburgh disagreed. To the astonishment of Nataline’s doctors, he ruled the transplant “experimental.” Insurers almost never pay for procedures they consider experimental, so this corporate medical director’s decision meant that the Sarkisyans would have to pay for the transplant and all related care out of their own pockets. Not being wealthy enough to do that, Nataline’s parents launched a campaign to rally public support and media interest in the case. It worked. CIGNA eventually agreed to cover the transplant. Unfortunately, so much time had passed since the original request had been made that Nataline’s other organs began to shut down. She died a few hours after the family got the news that CIGNA had changed its mind.

As chief spokesman for CIGNA at the time, I was on the receiving end of hundreds of calls and emails from reporters and also from regular folks who were outraged that CIGNA had initially refused to pay for Nataline’s transplant. The Sarkisyan family sued CIGNA, but the case was thrown out because of a Supreme Court precedent that shielded employer-paid plans from damages resulting from their decisions.

I wish I could say that Nataline’s story was unique. In the course of my 20 years in the industry, however, I handled media inquiries involving many cases in which coverage had been denied by a corporate medical director for one reason or another. I probably will never know how many of those people died as a result of not getting the care they needed, and I will never know if Nataline would have lived if she had gotten the liver transplant when her doctors wanted to do it. I will also never know if she might have gotten the transplant if she had lived in Canada or England or France, countries that do not permit doctors at for-profit corporations to make such decisions.

Insurance companies have ALWAYS had "death panels"

Show me where I denied they exist.

The death panel is part and parcel of the ACA.