Death Panels Already Exist - in Insurance Companies

[Crabtownboy]

Insurance companies have death panels choosing what will and what will not be covered.

For 2009, "death panel" was named as PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year", one of FactCheck's "whoppers", and the most outrageous term by the American Dialect Society.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel

es, 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.

http://www.publicintegrity.org/2011/03/21/3693/analysis-death-panels-fact-and-fiction

For four years, "death panels" has been the GOP's killer lie in the debate over the Affordable Care Act. The slander that proposed Medicare coverage for end-of-life counseling constituted a government "death panel" that would "pull the plug on grandma" was Politifact's 2009 Lie of the Year. Then what Sarah Palin dubbed a "metaphor" for the "government takeover of health care" (Politifact's 2010 Lie of the Year) shifted to the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), the committee designed to control costs and encourage best practices for Medicare. But with the launch of IPAB delayed past 2015 because slowing Medicare cost growth has not hit the legislatively-mandated trigger, the toxic "death panels" virus had gone dormant.

Dormant, that is, until about two weeks ago. Word that 10-year old end-stage cystic fibrosis patient Sarah Murnaghan did not qualify for an adult lung transplant under expert guidelines implemented in 2005 prompted right-wingers to resurrect the Obamacare Death Panels fraud. The sad irony, of course, is that next year the Affordable Care Act puts an end to the real death panels. That is, starting in 2014 Obamacare will halt the worst abuses of private insurers, whose refusal to cover those with pre-existing conditions; cruel "rescission" of policyholders who become sick and caps on lifetime benefits have produced financial disaster (and sometimes death) for hundreds of thousands of Americans. And that means the only ones pulling the plug on anyone are the Republican governors and GOP state legislatures rejecting the Medicaid expansion which will leave millions of their residents uninsured.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/17/1216858/-How-Obamacare-ends-the-real-death-panels#

 

[Revmitchell]

:laugh: Some people do not understand what a death panel actually is.

 

[Bro. Curtis]

He must be running out of arguments. He's recycling old ones.

 

[Revmitchell]

The DNC is panicked right now.

 

[thisnumbersdisconnected]

:laugh: Some people do not understand what a death panel actually is.

He must be running out of arguments. He's recycling old ones.

Look at the far left-wing website he's using for his source on this! That's laughable!

 

[preachinjesus]

There aren't death panels in the ACA, and there aren't death panels in current insurance companies.

 

[Crabtownboy]

There aren't death panels in the ACA, and there aren't death panels in current insurance companies.

Basically I agree with you. There are others who insist there are death panesl in ACA and if there are then there are in insurance companies. However those folk are not honest enough to admit it ... just playing politics.

There are individuals and panels in insurance companies who do make life and death decisions on individual cases.

 

[Bro. Curtis]

http://www.baptistboard.com/showthread.php?t=89895


Everyone knows there are death panels in Obamacare. It would not work without them.

 

[Bro. Curtis]

Why don't you send that woman in my link one of your hateful cartoons ?

 

[Crabtownboy]

Why don't you send that woman in my link one of your hateful cartoons ?

As usual you did not do your homework. She and her family would have saved money under ACA. Thanks for providing additional proof that ACA is not all that bad. Read on ....

Edie Sundby, a Stage-4 gallbladder cancer patient who is losing her individual health care policy in California, could pay less for comprehensive insurance in Obamacare’s health care exchanges.

Sundby’s story first gained national attention after she penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday, arguing that Obamacare would cost her more and force her to abandon her cancer doctors. Her high deductible individual health care policy from United Healthcare (called PacifiCare in California) had paid $1.2 million to keep her alive and “never once questioned any treatment or procedure” until earlier this year. In May, the company announced that it would be canceling insurance policies for its 8,000 enrollees and leaving the California market altogether. “Over the years, it has become more difficult to administer these plans in a cost-effective way for our members,” UnitedHealth spokeswoman Cheryl Randolph explained, suggesting that the company had long struggled to compete with insurers like Anthem Blue Cross, Blue Shield of California and Kaiser Permanente, who control more than 80 percent of the individual market.

Its exit left Sundby in a lurch. During an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday, she described her old catastrophic policy as “fabulous” and “fantastic,” in part because it paid for treatment by both Stanford and UC San Diego doctors. But the policy also came at a high cost. The AARP reported last year in a profile of Sundby’s fight against cancer that the family spent “tens of thousands of dollars” on treatment beyond the cost of coverage. “The results, financially, were ‘traumatic,’” AARP quotes her husband Dale as saying. “But we are, as a family, willing to go to the end, to spend whatever it takes. That’s what vows and commitments are all about.”
And so when ThinkProgress estimated the cost of a high-deductible policy offered by PacifiCare and then compared that plan to a policy in the California exchange, we found that the family would pay slightly less and benefit from a whole host of new consumer protections.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/201...-street-journal-buy-cheaper-obamacare-policy/

 

[Bro. Curtis]

You don't get it, as usual. The woman's current plan with her current doctors are not available with Obamacare. Even your own "article" says that.

And I won't debate it. You still owe me some answers in another thread. I won't invest the time engaging you on it, because you will disappear, and come back with, "I don't check all the threads", or "your not being rational", or any one of a host of other reasons you come up with to mask the fact that you don't have the respect for anyone enough to treat them honestly.

There are death panels in the ACA. There will be people who decide who lives, and who dies. There is nothing like this in the insurance industry.

 

[church mouse guy]

Under Medicare, which is now gutted by the Democrats, if you are 76 and have a heart attack or something you cannot be admitted into a hospital without the permission of your family doctor unless you assume responsibility for the bill.

If that is not a Democrat death panel, what is?

 

[Crabtownboy]

You don't get it, as usual. The woman's current plan with her current doctors are not available with Obamacare. Even your own "article" says that.

Because it is such a bad plan it did not meet the minimum requirements. And her costs were higher under her plan as the graphic below shows.

It is from: http://thinkprogress.org/health/201...-street-journal-buy-cheaper-obamacare-policy/

[/QUOTE]

 

[Crabtownboy]

Under Medicare, which is now gutted by the Democrats, if you are 76 and have a heart attack or something you cannot be admitted into a hospital without the permission of your family doctor unless you assume responsibility for the bill.

If that is not a Democrat death panel, what is?

I trust my family doctor much more than I do an insurance employee death panel to make that decision. If you do not trust your family doctor I'd suggest you find a new doctor.

 

[Bro. Curtis]

Because it is such a bad plan it did not meet the minimum requirements. And her costs were higher under her plan as the graphic below shows.

It is from: http://thinkprogress.org/health/201...-street-journal-buy-cheaper-obamacare-policy/

That "bad plan" spent 1.2 million dollars to keep her alive.

You don't know what you are talking about. We're used to that, here. This post of yours shows us what you really care about.

 

[Bro. Curtis]

I trust my family doctor much more than I do an insurance employee death panel to make that decision. If you do not trust your family doctor I'd suggest you find a new doctor.

What if that new family doctor isn't covered by Obamacare ?

Again, you don't know what you are talking about. Your excusing Obama's lies betray where your heart really is.

 

[preachinjesus]

Everyone knows there are death panels in Obamacare. It would not work without them.

No there aren't death panels. The actual ACA has language built into the bill to prohibit such things. This is a lie developed by folks on the far right to scare everybody else about a bill they couldn't defeat.

Listen, I don't like the ACA and think what is happening around it in DC is an abomination to the intent of our Founders. However, it is simply wrong to say death panels exist in the ACA.

I don't have much time today to devote to looking back through some old threads and the actual bill, but I've made this point before and backed it up with the actual bill. There is language in the bill and about the regulatory powers of various agencies that prohibits 'death panels.'

 

[preachinjesus]

Here's a quick look at where the ACS prohibits "death panels"

The health care law directs a new national board -- with 15 members who are political appointees -- to identify Medicare savings. It's forbidden from submitting "any recommendation to ration health care," as Section 3403 of the health care law states. It may not raise premiums for Medicare beneficiaries or increase deductibles, coinsurance or co-payments. The IPAB also cannot change who is eligible for Medicare, restrict benefits or make recommendations that would raise revenue.

What it can do is reduce how much the government pays health care providers for services, reduce payments to hospitals with very high rates of re-admissions or recommend innovations that cut wasteful spending. Some argue that because the IPAB can reduce the money a doctor receives, this could lead to an indirect form of rationing.

But the board wouldn't make any health care decisions for individual Americans. Instead, as PolitiFact Georgia reported, it would make broad policy decisions that affect Medicare's overall cost. [PolitiFact, 10/3/12]

 

[Crabtownboy]

What if that new family doctor isn't covered by Obamacare ?

Again, you don't know what you are talking about. Your excusing Obama's lies betray where your heart really is.

No, I was simply saying that I trust my family doctor over an insurance company employee making such a decision.

How about you. Would you rather have the insurance company make such a decision?

 

[Crabtownboy]

That "bad plan" spent 1.2 million dollars to keep her alive.

You don't know what you are talking about. We're used to that, here. This post of yours shows us what you really care about.

No one said, but you implied, that ACA would not have covered her. The article shows you are wrong ... and she would have saved money. Be honest now.