Donna Smith (of SiCKO): Big Insurance Shows Its Hand – Or at Least Its Finger

[marmar]

Published on Thursday, October 30, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Big Insurance Shows Its Hand – Or at Least Its Finger
by Donna Smith


When the day began, I sipped coffee with Hilda and Krikor Sarkisyan of Northridge, California, in a hotel restaurant as we waited to go confront the Cigna executives who denied their 17-year-old daughter's liver transplant. Nataline died last December. As this day closed, I sat across from an RN who was crying with sadness and rage for the Sarkisyan's loss and the absolute horror of what we experienced together in the Cigna lobby today.

If ever we needed proof of why the for-profit health insurance industry cannot be trusted with our health and well-being, we saw it today. We saw today the cruelty; we saw today all the reasons why we cannot trust that which we know we cannot trust. The lack of human compassion and the outright obscenity of the broken system have somehow codified into reality for us all a pattern of delays and denials of care that never can be reversed. Allowing a child to die –someone else's child – has somehow become acceptable behavior, and we have allowed chronic abuse of our trust to flourish and to be explained away by insurance executives who cannot tell the truth.

At Cigna, we walked into the lobby and moved toward the elevators that led to the inner sanctum of one of the nation's largest health insurance companies. Though Cigna security held the line as Hilda and Krikor protested and demanded an audience with the CEO, Edward Hanway, the company sent down their PR guy, Chris Curran, to do their dirty work and to put off our protesters – the grieving parents and their nurses. They were ringed now by many of the same nurses of the California Burses Association and the National Nurses Organizing Committee who had held them together on the day last December when Cigna allowed their daughter to die as the company first denied and then safely – for their revenue side, anyway – approved the needed transplant too late to save Nataline.

During the protest today we all looked up to see a group of people looking over the mezzanine railings above us. They must have been looking down at us during the whole protest. Hilda called up, "Do you work for Cigna?" And suddenly what we saw was too horrific to be believed. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/30-6

[alstephenson]

1. k & r (in disgust)

[Bozita]

2. Recommended. ... That really pisses me off!

[Supersedeas]

3. honor thy contracts -- eh, not so much