Private Health Insurance at Work: Hassling Cystic Fibrosis Patients
Cory Heidelberger
Madville Times, South Dakota
07/19/2008
Let’s put health care in a real, personal context:
Deron Arnold, brother of one of my wife’s old school friends, is 36, a pathologist in Minnesota. He has a wife, twin 3-year-old sons… and cystic fibrosis. That means, among other things, his body overproduces mucus, making it hard for his lungs to work.
Deron pays Blue Cross Blue Shield for his health coverage. Yesterday he got a letter from the Blue Cross Blue Shield saying that as of October 28, the company will no longer cover expenses at Fairview University Hospital in Minneapolis, where Deron plans to have his transplant. As of August 23, Blue Cross Blue Shield will stop covering physician expense at that hospital.
Deron, understandably, is in shock:
The implications of this are obviously potentially huge. I spent much of the morning on the phone in heated conversations with employees who knew about as much about it as I did. And had as much power and authority to change it. One Blue Cross employee even suggested transferring my care to Loyola…the nearest provider who could provide the same level of benefits. (For those of you who don’t know, Loyola is in Chicago.) [Deron Arnold, “In Shock,” Here in Time, 2008.07.18]
No accountability, no answers… doesn’t sound like a very effective health coverage system to me.
So now, because of an inexplicable business decision, a man with an incurable, terminal illness, who could get a phone call at any moment saying, “We have a lung; get to the hospital now,” has to devote precious time and energy to figuring out whether he can even afford to have his hospital do the operation.
Things like this don’t happen in Canada.
Another example: another friend of ours with cystic fibrosis couldn’t get her private insurer to cover the treatments that can keep cystic fibrosis in check while she attended grad school. She thus had to do what some of my readers tell me to do: leave the country. She went to Canada, to Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. Just like us during our stay in Canada, she paid her taxes and national health insurance premiums. Canada didn’t kick her out, or tell her she had to go to Calgary instead of Vancouver. Our friend got her treatment, and her education… in Canada.
Cystic fibrosis is hard enough. Private insurers shouldn’t make it harder. Countries with national health insurance don’t make it harder.