Bureaucracy in America
This is from the New York Times:
- Patient discovers he needs a new heart
- Hospital insists on $150,000 cash deposit; family should expect to pay $1 million
- Patient applies for Medicare disability
- Medicare refuses
- Patient enrolls in Medicaid
- Medicaid won’t pay for heart transplants
- Patient and sister raise $1 million on Twitter
- Hospital says it wants a secondary insurance policy on top of the $1 million
- Patient dies
- Lesson sister draws from the experience: private insurance is at fault.
But why private insurance? Why not the Gates Foundation? Or Warren Buffett? Or Fort Knox?
What a story. And the bottom line conlusion confirms your theory that everone’s IQ drops about 15 points when they start thinking bout health care!
The point of the article, as John notes, is to support the ObamaCare push for guaranteed issue by blaming private insurers for anything that goes wrong.
If Mr. De La Cruz had had private insurance, the story goes, he would have had the heart transplant. But he was only insurable in his late teens and very early twenties and he didn’t buy it.
Even with his pre-existing condition he was accepted by a government run health care plan (Medicaid). So, he was “covered” as the left understands it and would have been counted as insured in any survey.
The problem? Coverage is not care. We’re sorry, the government run health plan said, we do not do heart transplants.
So, the article presents Mr. De La Cruz’s family as advocating for the requirement that private insurance issue policies to people with pre-existing conditions. In other words, it should act more like Medicaid.
Never mind that guaranteed issue destroyed theMassachusetts health insurance market. The Massachuset health care reform is supposed to mitigate the damage guaranteed issue caused by replacing private insurers with the Commonwealth Connector policies. They are designed and run by government and operate a lot like, you guessed it, Medicaid.
With guaranteed issue you don’t need to pass a pesky public plan. Private insurers exit because they can’t make any money. Everyone’s choice will be restricted to the gatekeeper networks run by government controlled Connectors.
The other odd thing here is that the author of this article didn’t seem to read the whole memo on ObamaCare talking points. At the bottom is the one about how private insurers always throw people off their plan when they get sick.
The people in the article seem to want private insurance, apparently because they belive that it would have provided the care that Medicaid refused.
Cognative dissonance anyone?
Good comment, Linda. Under ObamaCare, millions of people will be pushed into Medicaid — many of whom were previously insured under an employer plan.
So, it looks as though health reform could actually reduce the number of people who have access to a heart transplant.
When I was in my early 20’s and attending college, my parents encouraged me to purchase coverage. This was the early 1980s, and the premium was only $30/month. It seemed a reasonable expense, especially after some minor prodding.
I doubt that it even occurs to many young people, students especially, that they even need health insurance. It’s not that they consciously rejected the idea, they’ve just never thought about it, and so cost isn’t even the issue.
This is an education issue, and not an area that requires reform. This might not have been the case if De La Cruz had purchased coverage before the onset of symptoms and later had his policy rescinded, but that’s not what happened here.
The problem here is top-to-bottom bureaucracy. It will not be solved by adding on more bureaucracy.
This is a very insightful post. It goes to the heart of one of the most important misconceptions in the entire health care debate. Namely, there are people who need care and may not be able to pay for it and the condition amy have come about throught no fault of their own.
But this does not mean that some randomly chosen insurance company should pay for it any more than any other randomly chosen firm or individual should pay for it.
Not to sound simplistic but isn’t this case a little like an uninsured auto driver having an automobile accident, doesn’t have the funds to repair their vehicle so sets out to find auto insurance so the insurance co will pay for the repairs after the fact??
how about the NY Times? they could have paid too.
let’s keep in mind that apparently the guy was willing to pay his premiums once he was dying but didn’t get to it before that. Hmmm?? also consider his sister is a CNN reporter. that tells me immediately she is a dope.
These people think with their hindparts. I’m sorry for her loss but she believes that the world owes her brother state of the art healthcare at the drop of a hat. These people are plain stupid.