Dad with Stage 4 cancer dies after insurance company said tumor-shrinking treatment was ‘not medically necessary’
https://nypost.com/2026/04/10/health/dad-with-cancer-dies-after-insurance-said-treatment-not-medically-necessary/Open linkView original on lemmy.world1217
Comments215
This would be enough to "radicalize me", but I don't think it's all that radical to be against a system that treats people this way.
That's the point, we're not living a neutral situation, we're under attack by bad people doing disgusting jobs
It's us against the Epstein class, really.
It isn't. It's inhumane the way these companies are behaving. They're a threat to society and this is humans' instinctual response to eliminating threats.
We are giving thousands of dollars of our money to a company to insure that our life and health will be taken care of, it should NOT be up to these companies what methods of remedies that a person needs to be kept alive and healthy are "deemed necessary"
Furthermore; these companies CEO should NEVER be paid more than a
averagemedian citizen... full stop. There's no reason an insurance company employee owns a yacht.Median citizen. The average is raised significantly by a few rich folks.
Great point and an even better ultimatum.
I’ll never understand how people were OK with putting middlemen with an interest in denying care between them and lifesaving treatment.
because apparently, the alternative is communism, and it will have death panels that will decide if you get to live in order to save costs...
Insurance companies are deathpanels though...
I believe that was their point...
Well maybe they are private enterprise death panels, but they trust them more than theoretical government death panels because the private sector is more efficient than government at cutting costs, such as, um, actually paying for needed care and oh shit they did not think that through.
edit: I meant to reply that to the comment above, but oh well. It's here now.
that was my point.
they prefer real material death panels, than the alternative, because it might have theoretical death panels. that no country with public healthcare has.
The danger of commenting first thing after waking up!
same, haven't got my coffee yet, how do you take yours?
Sugar and two creams usually. Sometimes black. Black and sugar today
here you go.
☕
Insurance is worse than communism in this case.
Tax paid universal healthcare and healthcare insurance both work on the idea of socializing the cost.
The difference is that insurance companies also need to make a profit too feed the owners. Since they don't actually produce anything that can make a profit, the only place they can grab the "profit" is by denying cover.
American healthcare insurance is exactly the same picture that is shown when people try to explain why communism doesn't work.
Nearly everything is better than the US&A’s take on capitalism.
I think if we used their language it might help: we should outsource healthcare costs.
The Acquired podcast went over this history very briefly in their Epic episode and it's so crazy how close we were to having universal healthcare.
Tl;dl:
So blame wage controls during WW2.
Oh and the Brits were facing similar forces when they were starting to stand up their healthcare system but decided instead to hire people to build a robust system so everyone didn't have to pay anything at the point of sale.
Yeah, it really was that simple.
I prefer to blame the people who take advantage of the sick
Universal healthcare is one of those things that's not only tricky to set up but also to keep going. Here in the UK, yep the NHS is amazing. But it's also terribly underfunded - despite taking over 10% of GDP (IIRC) we still have long waiting lists, and healthcare staff are overworked and underpaid. Greedy vermin are constantly looking for opportunities to privatise it, the only reason this hasn't already happened is that it would be hugely unpopular. I'm pretty sure almost everyone in the country would prefer more taxes be spent on the NHS and maybe a bit less on, say, fossil fuel subsidies - but here we are. Still, it's one of the few things our country can actually be proud of.
the only reason long waiting lists don't exist in the us is because some people just are not getting the things they need done at all. Even people with insurance you often can't find a specialist who takes it and the insurance denies things like in the article. The wait is very long when its impossible to get the treatment at all.
I wouldn't say it's tricky to keep going. Keeping it going is simply a case of funding it.
Now, repairing the damage of years of underfunding? That's tricky
Sir you are being shareholder-phobic
/s
God hates shareholders
Well, capitalists own the government that made this possible and they know a gap in the market when they see one...
thanks Reagan
Someone call Luigi.
I'm so fascinated by the image of him having 8 downvotes while the comment calling for him by name only has 1 🤔
Maybe people think he is depicting Jesus here? I mean the heart he is pointing at with his left hand is often seen in iconic portraits of Jesus (I am not sure if it also appears in portraits of saints, but that's not entirely relevant if the point would be whether people THOUGHT that or not)?
Oh who are we kidding, people probably just assume that the animation was generated by AI and so hate it for that reason:-P.
You are Luigi, We are all supposed to be Luigi
Mangione did nothing wrong.
What's wrong with getting McDonald's after playing video games?
Succulent american meal?
Life is not medically necessary
In fact its a massive risk factor.
I work in EMS. My advice to students and brand new EMTs is always the same: don't freak out when your patient is in cardiac arrest. Those are the easy calls. I have to keep people alive and if someone is crashing in front of me I have to figure out why and what I can try to do to stop it so they don't die. The ones that are already in cardiac arrest aren't getting any more dead, and the only outcomes are that we improve on that or we don't. We can't make them worse. Dead is the most stable condition.
Edit: That said, one of my favorite things about working in EMS is that I don't have to care about "medically necessary" or insurance companies. If I think my patient needs a treatment and it's in my protocol to give it, I give it. I don't have to ask for an insurance company's approval or get a payment method from my patients, I just get to help people.
Imagine all medicine working that way.
It does in most of Europe
Thank you for your service and for sharing your insight.
Yeah, but then your patients often get a 3000 dollar "ambulance" bill bcz ambulance companies are still privately run.
Some places have volunteer-only EMT services, and still charge thousands of dollars for an ambulance ride...
Forgive the long comment, and this is very US centered and doesn't apply to every area in the US. EMS systems vary broadly between states and even municipalities within states...
To put some of that in perspective:
And that's all before you get into paying anyone for their work. You aren't paying thousands of dollars for YOUR ambulance ride. You're paying for the fact that the ambulance existed to respond to your emergency in the first place. Many agencies don't get taxpayer money, and if they do, it's minimal. My last agency had townships paying them $2k a year to provide 24-7 ambulance service with paid providers. That doesn't even cover fuel, let alone anything else.
Is it absolutely bullshit that people should have to be bankrupted to pay for an ambulance bill? 100% No one should have to worry about money when they're having an emergency.
If you don't like it, advocate for a municipal tax. If every household paid something like $75-$100 a year you could have the best EMS service with well trained, well paid providers using the best, most up to date equipment available and you would never have to worry about an ambulance bill. The places that implement those taxes generally either don't bill at all or bill insurance and only take what insurance pays them, there's no balance billing of the patient.
But no one wants extra taxes, even if it could save them thousands of dollars, and for some reason people come out and support funding for the fire departments and the police departments and no one wants to advocate for support and funding for EMS, so instead you get this mess where EMS is somehow expected to hold itself together and be a profitable enough business to self sustain. You end up with a system where providers are underpaid, have to work 70+ hour weeks to survive (and thus are incredibly burnt out and exhausted - you really want a provider who has worked 70 hours in 5 days on 10 hours of total sleep making life or death decisions?), the good providers head to places where they can get better pay, the equipment and ambulances are old and being held together by sheer will of the providers, and patients still have insane bills.
Patients should not fund EMS. Government should fund EMS. It's a service, not a business, but under the current system in most places, it has to be a business if you want to be able to call 911 and have someone there to respond.
You pretty much addressed my responses to the first half of your comment in the second half.
That all sounds like reasons why the city/county/municipality/state should pay for EMS services.
People are already paying taxes, so it's not unreasonable for them to expect the governments that they're funding to provide the critical services that everyone needs. It's in everyone's interest to have a smoothly-operating EMS service that doesn't need to be run likely a business.
Tax money already pays for police, and their budgets are already bloated as is. Why the hell can't tax money be used to pay for all those costs of maintaining an EMS service? No one should be landed with a multi-thousand dollar bill for having a medical emergency.
Healthcare in general should run this way, but especially emergency medical services. It's absurd that it isn't. But too many americans are afraid of the big scary "socialism," so they continue to let billionaire oligarchs fuck them over like this. It's insane.
My family member was charged US$3K by the insurance because they were hit by a car outside of their county of residence.
It's the ultimate pre-existing condition.
What's ironic is that the big opposition from the GOP to ObamaCare was this ludicrous idea of "Death Panels" weighing human life against budgets.
And yet, when the panels are a dictatorial insurance algorithm, where is that classic 2009-2010 outrage?
Every accusation is a confession with Republicans
You probably already know but, those arguments aren't why the GOP were outraged. It's what they thought would be most likely to get the public outraged.
"the public" seems dumb as fuck.
The public is way less intelligent than "dumb as fuck" hopefully we can get there on the way to marginally dumb. But I doubt it
Yes, you can blame the GOP for defunding education as well.
(I have exactly zero love for the Zionazi-owned Dems either but I'm not aware of them ever defunding education)
Or discriminating against gays, or cutting food stamps, or invading Greenland, or storing nuclear secrets in bathrooms, or...
I do recall them being unabashedly genocidal in Palestine though, so I'm not exactly in a rush to give them credit for less-than-the-bare-minimum.
That's table stakes in the US unfortunately. There's no option for "no genocide", you need a complete reform of the electoral system (basically anything newer than 18th century will do) and then some new political parties. But since that is wishful thinking at the moment, the lesser of two evils will do.
Weird, I was able to find one.
"genocide is the lesser of two evils" is exactly where this mentality has gotten you. You may be compromised enough to sign your name off on that. I am not and never will be.
That no longer matters as they are not the ones in charge anymore...
That's not true, and a dangerous cop out
We shall see, only time will tell (though it's interesting that any sitting President is allowed to legally assassinate anyone they want with virtually no oversight that we are told of).
Fair.
The panels are often just an automated script that always replies with Denied the first time too, since people sometimes dont fight it.
It's like the trolley problem, except on one track is somebody's beloved father and on the other is some executive's 5th yacht.
I remember when I was 5 years old, my dad tried asking me the trolley problem.
So I took my train, and yelled at the G.I. Joes on my tracks "GET OFF THE TRAIN TRACKS, IDIOTS!!!" and ran them over. Then I backed the train up, switched tracks, and ran over spiderman. Then I yelled "FREE BONUS POINTS!!!". Then I punched my dad in the balls, and ran upstairs giggling.
About a year ago my dad reminded me of that story. I'm in my 40s now. So I told him "I stand by that decision."
This situation was more complicated then that. The treatment in question was histiotripy. While it might be less invasive than traditional surgery, it isn't necessarily "better" when dealing with stage 4 cancer that failed to respond to surgery or chemotherapy. It just uses sound waves instead of scalpels.
Realistically, this guy would have died soon regardless of the treatment. It's unlikely the technician would have been able to identify all the cancer after it's spread throughout his body. It's success depends on being able to target the majority of cancer cells, which isn't easy for Stage 4 cancer.
That's not even the point. Trying everything possible should be the norm, and it shouldn't be dictated by some uncaring jackass with a 35th floor office. The entire little point of health insurance is to distribute the cost of those in need amongst all of the input of the whole. If you take enough of that input as profit for the stockholders and executives, there's less available to do what the insurance is meant to do. They're legally embezzling the investment of the whole without providing sufficient practical benefit to warrant it.
But even if you made the insurance system completely non-profit, there’s no upper bound on how much you can spend on each individual. You’d still run into cases where you have to distribute a limited number of resources.
Most of the world can pull it off. Why not the US?
Fuckin' A.
I’m not advocating for the US style of health insurance. I’m saying this specific case, if the medical commentators in this thread are to be trusted, may have ended up the same way in a non-profit model.
I think the point is that while your point is broadly true, in this specific scenario the treatment might not have been available anyway. Looking up on the named procedure, it seems likely most nations would have declined to offer this treatment, considering it futile in his situation.
Let's cross that bridge once we get there
I know you think you're being pragmatic but it's really just coming off as depraved.
If it's recommended by the medical team, who the fuck are the insurance company to say no.
Does "not easy" make a treatment not medically necessary then?
This is why we need the Mario Party
They kill us through fraud And theft, and are surprised that we celebrated Luigi's deeds. The truth is they will only start to care when more of them start to drop. How many more millions need to die because of this BS before we're ready to bring justice down on their heads as a collective class?
Everyone needs to read Billionaire's Island.
Is that a euphemism for the Epstein Files?
Nope. It's a comic that happens to be a cautionary tale to billionaires, that they will absolutely ignore.
None your society is just as complacent as the greedy sociopathic class.
I think you mean complicit. "Complacent" doesn't make very much sense in that context.
It's also a hollow edgy take, the likes of which would be expected from a shut-in teenager who doesn't actually interact with people. Most Americans are exploited to the point of exhaustion, which is a little more complicated than just "they're complicit", and some Americans are putting in quite a lot of effort to improve the shithole country we're from.
Have you ever had a warehouse job, or anywhere else where you can actually speak with the exploited masses? If so, did you speak to them? Have you ever spend time in real-world organizing spaces? Not talking about just going to a protest, I mean getting involved with the people in your community who you're accusing of being complicit. (PSL doesn't count.)
well...
it did actually fix some things about the last company, last time...
The insurance company in question "partners with" United Healthcare, so..... maybe not so much.
no, they just didn't get the memo.
This is flat out no different than shooting someone in my book.
This is why people are behind Luigi.
Hey, I'm a people! I'm behind Luigi! I'm proof of this!
The family should get back every penny they've paid to that insurance company.
What the fuck are they paying them for?
Not to have a tax penalty. Also the privilege to be told no. There are people literally dying to have insurance that will also tell them no
It's also designed to keep people dependent on their employers. You land a salaries position at a company that provides one of the few decent healthcare plans in the US, and suddenly you'll put up with a lot of shit to keep that job...
There hasn't been a tax penalty in the US for not having insurance for years now.
Huh. They ask all kinds of questions about it still.. but im really just running off of what my mom told me when i first started filing lol
It seems some states do impose a tax but it was struck down at the federal level.
Until you need surgery and it's 400k. For clarity insurance is a scam. Not going without it in today's climate is taking a massive risk, though
Total scam. Shouldn't exist. I hate it.
American style health insurance is a scam. I pay around 600 euros a month in Germany, for me and two kids, and there's no such thing as "copay". Delivering a baby costed us about 8 euros in parking fees. This is a private company offering insurance, there's no single payer in Germany. Other European and Asian countries do have single payer, with similar costs (the contribution is then a tax instead of insurance payment). It's the American "five yachts per CEO" model that causes problems.
Yes, for most people, in most years. But the cost of health care tends to be very, very unevenly distributed. A person might see medical bills of less than $1000 per year for 20 years and then get a single $1,000,000 year. So at that point, it's an annualized cost of $50,000 per year, even if most years it's about $1,000. Some estimates are that 10-30% of all medical spending in the US is in the last year of life.
Many believe that because of this distribution, health insurance should primarily be a catastrophic care model where most people pay a premium that doesn't cover anything for the first few thousand, then covers a percentage of the cost up to the out of pocket maximum of like $15,000 or so for a family, but does cover everything after that. For a typical household, being able to predict annual healthcare expenses for the entire year is very useful.
And personally, I'm pretty sympathetic to this catastrophic care model as a short term transition to an all payer model that looks like Switzerland's system (private insurance, private providers, mandatory coverage, strict price controls, and subsidies for anyone who can't afford the normal premiums).
If you could predict everything perfectly then that’s fine. What if instead of a normal delivery, you needed a week in the NICU? Then that $20k quickly becomes $100k.
Again, in America, until literally anything happens. I've seen 7 figure bills hit ridiculously quick.
What's the guy gonna do? Sue them? He's dead. Murdered by the capitalist authoritarians.
The only rightful place for kings is under the blade of a guillotine.
Guillotines are too 18th century. I am a fan of woodchippers. Feet first, of course!
I don't want to hear a billionaire shrieking as their toes are mulched. Even if they're parasites, it'll still sound like a human shrieking as their toes are mulched.
Just guillotine them and redistribute their wealth already.
I believe this is what is meant by "pull oneself up by one's bootstraps"
a scimitar would be sufficient.
The most painful thing we can do to them is take their money and make them live like the rest of us.
IDK man, you got some lemon juice, duct tape, and a cheese grater?
Can we at least carve their highest net worth into their foreheads?
They might appreciate that - an instant indicator that they are different ("better"). Even if it makes it impossible to hide.
Can't the family sue?
Ah yes, America, where corporate murder and tragic loss of life is compensated with money.
fam can do other things as well
luigi tried to tell us
He could have done some side jobs to cover it. I mean, even though it is unethical, I've heard that smuggling drugs could help you cover these medical bills. Just not sure how you get into that
They're really tryna create another Luigi aren't they?
I suspect they've created many.
Only one became active. Allegedly.
So far.
Whenever an economic argument is invoked to justify for or against doing something, it’s always a vacuous position.
Economics must be subservient to the needs of the society it exists within.
Heck yes! Even the implementation of AI, and people getting let go. If enough people are unemployed, who's actually buying the products that these companies are selling, peddled by the same AI that replaced the employees with? Feels like a free for all with these tech, not necessarily watching out for the overall impact on human societies....
He was dying. This would likely have given him more time but not stopped him from dying in the near future. To an insurance company, these results are the same except that the latter case costs them more money.
You are also dying in the future. So no treatment for you. It's even cheaper the sooner you die. And since you don't need money after you've died, lets make your last days so expensive that we can extract all the money from you and if possible from the rest of your family. Profit.
Whoa whoa whoa. We can't just let people die until we've extracted their economic output, up to the point where the cost of the treatment exceeds expected remaining economic output.
Hear me out… we could connect their brains to computers and keep them in a state of permanent office-hours where they fill in Excel sheets and write reports.
I checked this article and the NBC one linked in the NY Post article, and they didn't name the insurer? What the fuck are they holding water for this shitty company for?
In the NY Post linked article:
I'm an idiot. Thank you!
And yet it is often by law that people have to have insurance that pays them nothing when the time comes.
It is nothing short of robbery.
I wouldn't use the word "robbery".
I'd use the word "murder".
It's both, really. They take your money and provide nothing in return while you die.
"Some advice I learned early in my career, if I may? It is not what you kill, but who you kill that matters in the end. So... get out there and kill someone... special."
Plenty of honest people working there just trying to make ends meet who are on the same shitty insurance plans we are.
I guess school shootings aren't tragic? I rather shitty things that currently happen, happen to really shitty institutions like insurance companies
Luigi, where are you?
They locked up an innocent man. Luigi didn't do NOTHIN!
Nah he got arrested for taking out the trash. The former mayor and disgrace Eric Adams should get a bigger perp walk for his corruption case than the badass one Luigi got.
hes fighting his alter ego waluigi.
This is why we have people like luigi
Need more actually
anything stopping you?
Lots of things
This is how the West develops suicide bombers
it's also how we get luigi
No no, there's no reason for you to blow yourself up! This is the west... we have guns.
Time to let Luigi out for a couple of days I think.
Death panels by any other name wouldn’t be so bleak.
Remember when the Republicans were all screaming that Obamacare was going to create death panels? Should have thought twice before giving health insurance companies ideas...
Long before the first Republican mentioned a "death panel," private health insurance companies already had the same thing. And because Medicare was already a thing, the government also had the equivalent of death panels.
No, the truth is that "death panel" is just a scary sounding phrase and never had any real relevance. I've noticed that conservatives don't use words for their meanings. They use them for how scary they sound.
That definitely tracks neuroscience's finding that conservatives over-express fear in general. Probably one of the reasons why they cannot understand liberals.
Luigi 2 Luigi Harder
Can we get a reputable coven of witches to hex these fuckers?
I wonder if their CEO considers himself medically necessary? To me it seems their C-suite might be a bit of a cancerous growth on the business.
Any rememberries when the talking point was government death panels determining life value was why we couldn't have universal medicare? Tony Stank remembers.
"People will die anyway, why give them healthcare? We are not into that business, just give us your money, you greedy little pigs".
Nothing like the nypost comment section to get you out of your bubble. Can't believe there's so many insurance company defenders
I'm actually surprised given how much Ben Shapiro got flack from his own audience for attacking Luigi.
When money dictates how the world should work.
So are they going to be as surprised and outraged again when another Mario brother shows up to clean up this mess?
"Its-a Me! Mario! AND LUIGI MOTHA FUC----- coin sound effect "
Someone close to them might just turn in Luigi one day. Good job.
Mototov the fuck
Love this comment because they appear to think doctors are paid by the insurance companies and not the hospitals they work for.
Nobody works more free hours than medical staff to begin with. free overtime is like a requirement, and a part of the system built to exploit the workers. “You’re not a team player unless you work for free like the rest of us”
I don’t have real data... but much of the medical staff in the US has a pretty strong union. So if this were the case, it would be because the union chose not to make it an issue in exchange for something else. Thus it isn't really free overtime.
There are surely jobs for which there is no union and unpaid overtime is standard. So they would technically work more unpaid overtime.
That said, unpaid overtime should be illegal. Or the hospitals insurance should refuse to cover mistakes made during unpaid overtime, which would give the hospital reason to not allow it.
More than that; hospitals are required to provide emergency care to people who cannot pay. This often ends up being more expensive than just providing care before it becomes an emergency; which the rest of us end up paying for in the form of higher costs.
Approximately 45,000 Americans are murdered due to the lack of health insurance. In addition, contributing factors, from the piss poor US healthcare system, leads to over 200,000 deaths annually. WTF USA and you're worried about the price of fucking fuel for your pick-up trucks! Vote for the few politicians that will cap the damn medical expenses, regulate the health industry properly and socialize medicine. If not, it will get worse.
I once went to the ed for butt disease related dehydration. The idiot PA manning the ed would not be gainsayed about my medical history that I was there for, not him. It could be possible that his 15 second glance through my 400 volume medical records may have missed some nuanced. But no, according to him I had the flu not the fatal butt disease..I meani get it out was in the middle of a flu outbreak and I was merely missing half of my butt and much of everything above it. My fatally afflicted by butt disease parts were just at the store buying cigarettes I couldn't know what I'm talking about.
A week later I get a letter from the medical group my insurance is through. "Jello my liege YMCA blah blah blah you went to the hospital when you only had the flu
Are you having a fucking stroke, you can't use a word like gainsay if you're not going to use proper grammar throughout the comment.
I read that twice and I still don't know what is going on.
I had no problem with it. Dude's got the butt disease and insurance (predictably) fucking sucks.
Made perfect sense to me
Brent Wolfingbarger
something tells me the company will be needing some insurance of its own soon...
So not that I like insurance companies (I very much do not) but this seems odd. I do histiotripsy, which is super cool! It allows us to treat certain tumors that could be difficult to get otherwise. But… histiotripsy is can be substituted with lower cost treatments almost always (Cryo or MW ablation) and if curative possibility were present with histiotripsy then another treatment modality would be feasible too.
Hey, it's a me !
Death panel.
Necessary for thee, not necessary for me I guess
We don't need no water,....
Was he Republican?
Does an actual doctor believe that too?
We don't have infinite resources to spend on treatment that won't actually help.
This is a slop article. No actual info on success chances, prior treatments etc.
OH SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH YOUR "FINITE" RESOURCES BULLSHIT. The DOCTOR recommended the treatment. The only barrier to having more time with their loved one wasn't knowledge, or skill, or reSoUCEes... It was money, a FAKE thing WE invented. You know what IS a finite resource FUCKING TIME. Our priorities as a society are so absolutely bonkers. We could have given that family more of an actual unrenewable gift that can never be replaced, restored, or generated and instead we STOLE that from them to give more of an invented thing of fictious value to the elites. Elites that have so much of it already they could never conceivable spend it.
No matter how much you scream, it will still be true. You can't yell and curse it away.
Money is finite, even if we made it up. Everyone can't have everything.
Amazing how a supposedly finite resource can be printed on a whim at the convenience of specific class of people.
So there is no reason, why all 300 million people in America shouldn't get this treatment right now, in case they have cancer? All at once preferably.
If a DOCTOR (key word) diagnosis you with cancer, then YES. Otherwise, no your time would be better spent doing something else. May I suggest a hobby? Perhaps building strawmen?
Ngl, the strawman joke was pretty funny.
Your argument rests upon the inaccurate assumption that because things are what they are, that it is inevitable that they will stay the same.
You're missing the point; everyone can have health care.
Counter-theory: nothing got stolen, the insurance already paid a million for other treatments buying him a lot of time, but in the end the cancer won.
Now we don't know any of that because the article is slop and doesn't tell us anything that wouldn't fit the sob-story narrative.
Whose money? Insurance is paid by a pool of people. That makes it a community resource and when a community members gets sick that resource should be allocated to taking care of them. People don't pay insurance thinking "Gee I sure hope when I need coverage they deny me and direct my funds to the fatheads at the top of my insurance company."
And the article being true/false/slop is irrelevant. Most Americans have experience with this fucked up system of ours that's why it resonates.
The very beginning the article:
It still sounds like this was an experimental treatment. It was brought to the doctor by the patient's wife. So we don't know all the specifics of how likely it would have been to help.
Even so, these kinds of experimental treatments are often paid for by the companies that provide them. There's still a process they go through to get a "compassionate use" case approved, because they don't have the resources to provide it to everyone who asks. I wonder if they were denied for this, if they never applied for it, or if this particular company just doesn't offer it.
I'm not saying that US healthcare isn't fucked or anything. Just that the situation has more nuance than the headline suggests.
Edit: sorry, should have realized when I saw the same headline on reddit that this was a reddit thread.
The treatment definitely would have worked, and if we didn't have health insurance companies then cancer would literally never kill anyone, because we'd just keep trying experimental treatments until everyone lived forever.
I hope for your sake that boot polish isn't a carcinogen when ingested orally.
You're just trolling? Or your reading comprehension needs a lot of work? Or maybe you're some kind of paranoid, living the loneliest life, because all you see are bootlickers everywhere. I genuinely don't know which one it is.
How do you think they would get treatment if no doctor believes it would help?
Why didn't they get the procedure done anyway? So what, they owe $50K.
Does his hospital insist on payment up front? Last time that I went, I was billed, though it was for much less money.
How "new" was the treatment? Has it proven effective prior? He had gone metastatic already.
So.... they let him die to keep from dipping into their retirement savings? Am I reading this right?
I am not generally a pro-insurance company person... but 50K? Even if I had NO retirement savings, personally I'd prefer bankruptcy over death
We have had doctors and hospitals deny or refuse medical treatments because of insurance reimbursement. It does in fact happen. A lot more than people think. My guess is he felt the savings would be completely depleted because the cost would be more than they had and then his family would be left with nothing.
oh yea, i heard Doctors, or private practices choose to drop or not accept certain kinds of insurance, even if you have similar to everyone else. they are more likely to accpet a employee negotiated plan over one you bought individually.