Lawsuit blames disability on insurance delay

[suffragette]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/315605_injured14.html


Two Seattle surgeons told Tara Sadler that she needed to have surgery -- and right away.

~snip~

In a lawsuit to be filed Monday in King County Superior Court, Sadler's attorneys contend State Farm Insurance's delay of an emergency operation left the 38-year- old Selah mother permanently disabled.

"I don't think they have the right to play God, and they did," said Sadler, who now uses an electric wheelchair and has limited use of her right arm and leg. "Nobody should have to go through this."

Her attorneys, Karen Koehler and Scott Brumback, say State Farm, the largest auto and home insurer in the state and country, let a claims adjuster with no medical training make a call that changed Sadler's life.

"This is an insurance company, and they had no business holding up an essential medical procedure," Koehler said. "This woman's health was not on their mind."


This is tragic.

It does prove the fallacy of those who insist that a problem with universal health care is that people sometimes have to wait for care. Clearly, that is already the situation in some cases, as shown here. But under universal health care, that wait would be decided by a physician who has the best knowledge of whether or not that would be appropriate and safe. Here the decision was made some agent at the insurance company, on the basis of saving money rather than ensuring health.

We need single payer, univeral health care NOW!

[Kagemusha]

1. I bet the adjusters would say, what financial training do these doctors have?

How are they qualified to best assess how to spend scarce dollars on finite medical resources and ensure the best care that society can afford? How do doctors decide what society can afford? Who trained them in that? Who gave them the right to impoverish others for the care of a single person without the approval and agreement of the people who manage vast sums of money that cannot stretch forever and cannot save everyone?

Now, I'm certainly not agreeing with that view. It's just, I see people shouting for single payer universal health care ("NOW!") with absolutely no regard for what it would cost and who has to pay for it and what not and I'm wondering, the claims adjustors are there for a reason, aren't they? They weren't invented for the sole purpose of helping people get maimed and killed as a result of lack of medical care. They don't get up every day dreaming of who they can murder by spreadsheet (a common theme from Daily Kos). They're there because the way civilization as it exists and is set up allots finite resources to medical care and (right or wrong) the management of these finite resources is considered too important to be left to doctors.

I don't know why I even wrote that because it won't matter how I put it - I'll probably get my head bitten off anyway. I just keep hearing about this "with no medical training" thing and I'm asking myself, does management WANT people with medical training making these decisions, or would that training be counterproductive for the role these people are assigned in life?