The light hadn't illuminated her bright blue eyes for weeks. The doctors had to induce a coma after she began to suffer from organ failure. But this wasn't your ordinary girl. She had survived her first bout with leukemia when she was 14. When the cancer came back three years later, a bone marrow transplant was initially successful.
Then her liver failed. And here she was in a hospital run by UCLA, awaiting a donated organ. It came. The liver was ready to go on Dec. 10, but the money wasn't. CIGNA, the company managing the health insurance of the girl's family, would not authorize funding for the transplant. 150 picketers showed up at the local CIGNA offices. CIGNA finally ended up funding the liver transplant.
But it was too late for Nataline Sarkysian. Only a few hours after funding was granted, Nataline was taken off of life support. She was 17.
A lawyer for the Sarkysians is suing CIGNA for causing Nataline's death. CIGNA, when it finally granted money to pay for the transplant, offered to pay out of its own pocket. But CIGNA was only managing the Sarkysian's health insurance account, and if it had authorized funding for the procedure in the first place, it wouldn't have had to pay a dime. So why didn't CIGNA just authorize it initially? Why didn't the policy cover the life-saving procedure?
Perhaps most importantly: A liver was available and the UCLA hospital had conducted organ transplants before without insurance payments to cover the procedure. Why not this time?
The sad truth is that it doesn't matter whose fault it is. At least, not to Nataline. There is something wrong with a health care system that ends up killing those it is supposed to protect.
The Sarkysians had medical insurance and still couldn't pay for a procedure that may have saved their daughter. The story of too many Americans, however, is that becoming insured is just not feasible.
Forty-seven million Americans are uninsured and an estimated 38 million more possess inadequate insurance. The costs are just too high. The annual premium employers must pay to cover their workers is climbing with no end in sight. Today, the annual premium is estimated at $12,100 for a family of four. A full-time minimum-wage worker makes $10,700 per year.
As a result, many people just don't have insurance. But when they get sick or hurt, they still need treatment. The uninsured, however, do not have the luxury of going to the doctor for minor problems. A gash becomes a deep scratch, a torn ligament becomes a bad strain and pneumonia becomes just another cough. But when the cut won't stop bleeding, the elbow just won't bend and breathing is impossible, a trip to the hospital cannot be avoided.
Deamonte Driver had a toothache, but his mother couldn't afford the $80 for a dentist to pull out the tooth. On one particularly painful day, he paid a visit to the hospital where doctors found that a bacterial infection from the tooth had spread to his brain. The medical costs ran up to $250,000. Deamonte died last February at the age of 12.
Preventative care is supposed to cut down on overall health costs-as long as patients can actually get it.
But that's the way the market is supposed to work, right? People who can't afford the good simply don't get the good. But at the root of the health care debate is a fundamental question: Do we have a moral obligation to provide health care for everyone in need?
Nataline Sarkysian was 17 years old when she died. She had insurance, but was not saved. Now imagine 8.7 million other children all without insurance. They don't even have the chance Nataline had. Almost one in every five poor children is uninsured. Are these children just necessary casualties of the market system, or are they the result of an unnecessary evil?
No system is perfect. Universal health care is susceptible to long waiting periods because of government rationing. A more open market system would have massive informational asymmetries to overcome (how do you know a good doctor other than by word of mouth?) and would still leave some uninsured.
But the current system is atrocious. We spend $2.3 trillion per year on our health care as a nation. No other industrialized nation that actually covers ALL of its citizens even comes close to running that tab. Yet even with all this spending, the United States ranks poorly compared to other developed countries with respect to infant mortality and life expectancy. The United States ranks 67th in immunization coverage internationally, sitting directly under Botswana.
2.3 trillion dollars. The richest nation in the world with a health care problem as bad as a 12-year-old's toothache.
Elad Gross is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Thursday.
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