These parents wage an internet campaign to lobby Aetna to cover their son’s treatment.
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{ 15 comments }
This is obviously very distressing. While I feel a great deal of sympathy for the parents, I question the appropriateness of spending over $1,000,000 in an attempt to prolong (not save, mind you) the life of a child with fatal genetic disease.
While I certainly don’t think that insurance companies should triage based on quality of life or expected lifespan, there have to be some limits drawn or we will bankrupt ourselves in an attempt to eek out another day or week or month for lives that involve as much suffering as they do happiness.
I have seen neurologically devistated children such as this subjected to stem cell transplant as a last-ditch effort to slow (and not reverse) the course of the disease, and personally I find it difficult to digest. I wonder who is being treated – the parent, afraid to lose their child, or the child him/herself. And if it’s the parent, then shouldn’t someone have the ability to intervene? Or should we allow people to bankrupt the health care system as they search for that 1 in 1,000 (or 10,000 or 1,000,000) chance of helping or saving their child?
Some people feel compelled to share (inflict) their pain on the rest of the world. The battle was about physical therapy. PT is not rocket science and largely involves hours of one on one contact between the patient and provider. Once the PT regimen is determined then the parents should take up the slack here. The kid’s life is short and this is how they can spend some quantity of quality time while they can.
That they managed to subject this kid to a terribly invasive and unpleasant therapy (bone marrow transplant) and have the insurer pay says a lot about how free Aetna was with big bucks for no expected sustained benefit.
This once again goes to show that whining and complaining will almost always get you further than if you accept responsibility for your actions.
They had this insurance plan for 11 years and its terms were clearly laid out, yet they are incredulous when they finally read the terms to the contract agreed to follow.
Most people lose all economic discretion when considering the price of healthcare. So you might be able to prolong a child’s life for a year, maybe 2 for 1,000,000 dollars. Done, Aetna foots the bill. What if there were a lifesaving treatment that could cure this child for a billion dollars or a trillion dollars? If there were I am willing to bet many parents would demand it if there child were at risk, yet this would make no economic sense.
This is the same financial indiscretion wielded by juries in injury verdicts. Overlawyered.com ran a story about a jury in Mississippi that awarded $50 billion dollars to a plaintiff for a medical injury because they couldnt figure out how many zeros were in a million.
Anna Pou and her henchmen would have known how to handle this case.
I don’t know guys. Go home and take a look at your own children. Would they be worth a million bucks to save their life? Or would you have to look and then admit….”If only I hadn’t ordered all those thousands and thousands of unnecessary tests all these years, I wouldn’t have driven the ins. companies out of business.” The ins. companies would then have money to save my child.”
I have never seen so many arrogant people in my whole life. How can you just take about letting children die or even killing them just because YOU think it is best? Its even made worse by the fact that you are physicians. I’m sure many low lifes sitting in prisons have more morals and values than what some of you have..You guys really are the exact definition of two-faced. I will NEVER trust another physician again! Thank you!
Anon 6:58, you are a real piece of work. Anyone who expresses an opinion different to yours, if they happen to have some medical qualifications, then they are arrogant. You must be insufferable in person; reading your tiresome, ranting, shrill and illogical postings is tiresome enough for anyone. Good thing you have that computer, because heaven knows who would have the constitution to put up with your hostility in person. Like any crackpot, the last thing you will ever be is persuasive.
Anon 6:58,
First off, I have been making several of the comments in this thread against massive spending for this child and I am not a doctor and do not work in healthcare. I am an economist, so your anger at physicians might be misdirected. You can hate economists all you want.
Secondly, I am not saying this child’s life is not worth a million dollars. You act like there is an unlimited supply of healthcare, medicine, operating rooms, and doctors. The truth is there are finite quantities of all these. I am saying that the use of these precious resources would be better spent saving the lives of 500 people that need treatment of curable diseases. You want to talk about morals? How would you explain your decision to all the children who fall through the safety nets of Medicare because of lack of funding due to million dollar treatments you so adamantly support that are essentially usuless at curing the underlying disease? Are you saying that the life of one sick child should get priority over the other sick children just because you feel sorrier for him? Luckily people like you aren’t in charge of the distribution of healthcare because you would quickly waste all available resources to the fist person who had a sad story at the expense of everyone else. Your heart is in the right place but you are too stupid to understand the idiocy of what you are saying.
Maybe someone can fill in the blanks for me from psychology 101 but I seem to remember 6 or 7 levels of moral reasoning used to make important decisions. The highest level, which few people attain, is based upon the ability to weigh competing values and make the best decision that does the most good for all that are involved.
6:58 is stuck in the 3rd or fourth level in which their reasoning and outlook is only based immediately on themselves.
What if Aetna could no longer cover emergency appendectomies, meningitis, fractures, or whatever for the insureds because they blew the whole wad on one patient. Our Nation has to grapple with this as we seem to inevitably heading towards socialized medicine. 1% of the population uses ~ 50% of the healthcare dollar. Lines will have to be drawn.
Dear anon 10:16
Thank you.
b
This child has Tay-Sachs. Even if trillions were available for live-prolonging treatment, would such treatment be ethically right? As far as I can see, even the bone marrow treatment was somewhat shady.Why can’t the parents let go; – in the child’s own interest?
The question was: Go home and look at your own children and then tell us if their life is worth a million dollars to save? you’ve done your abusive bit at someone who is obviously more caring than any of you, but not one of you have answered their question.
Maybe your child could have cancer and need a million dollars to save him. The health professionals (you know the ones that are in business to save lives) can tell you “sorry no can do, we might need money to pay for some appendectomies.”
So what if someone thinks you’re arrogant? I tend to agree.
Healthcare in this country will not improve until you change teh way you practice. You blame your pateints and their families for bankrupting ins., when you know it is you who are quilty of it. How many MIRs, ct scans, or whatever does it take before enough money has been spent that would have covered an appendectomy? Instead of changing your work habits you would rather withhold treatment from children and call it “For the good of healthcare.”
< <"Instead of changing your work habits you would rather withhold treatment from children and call it "For the good of healthcare."
Might as well. It certainly wouldn’t be for the good of the children.
The only advantage of being a physician these days is that we can do the best for our families…they don’t have to get the same shoddy treatment the rest of you get…
6:53 I have family members that are physicians. They are nothing as how you portray yourself on a blog. They care very much for their patients. Speak for yourself but not for the entire profession as a group.
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