In the
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/23/BU7NV7CSI.DTL&type=health">news today is a story about a woman who lost her healthcare right in the middle of breast cancer treatment. Health Net corporation claimed that she lied about her weight and a heart condition on her application. As a result, she had $129,000 in debt and doctors stopped treating her because of her inability to pay them. A judge found that the insurance company screwed her over and the judge awarded her $9 million. Who knows if she will get a chance to use that money because there have been health complications since then.
Some may wonder if $9 million (total from punitive damage, paying for the healthcare and emotional distress) is the "right" number to award the woman. There is a clue in the article to figure this out:
Hundreds of cases in California have been settled quietly in confidential agreements.
Hundreds have gotten themselves a lawyer and won out-of-court. So, how many never got lawyers in the first place? How many did lawyers turn down? Thousands? And this is just in California....Across the whole US? Tens of thousands?
During the case
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/09/eveningnews/main3482856.shtml?source=mostpop_story">it was revealed that Health Net had a policy to give bonuses to reviewers who dropped more people (just like Michael Moore said in SiCKO):
Documents Health Net was forced to hand over reveal senior analyst, Barbara Fowler, single-handedly dropped hundreds of policy holders like Bates from the rolls every year.
The shocker: the company awarded her bonuses based on how many policy holders she dropped.
Who knows the number, but insurance companies like Health Net are not going to rescind policies as a general rule when people get sick unless it is financially worth it to them. If judges typically award punitive damages one or two orders of magnitude higher than the cost that the insurer would have had to originally pay ($9 million versus $129K), then you can expect that to be 'worth it', that insurance companies are rescinding policies and not getting caught an order of magnitude more frequently than they have to pay up. So, $9 million makes them screw people over less. It's the right number.
Of course a better system would be to get the corporations who are out for themselves out of the system in the first place: universal healthcare.