Did the insurance company kill the 17-year-old girl?
Dec 27th, 2007 | By Michael L. Saile, Jr., Esq. | Category: BlogsIt has been reported by the national news that a 17-year-old girl from California who had leukemia and needed a liver transplant was denied the transplant by Cigna Corp., her health insurance company. Cigna denied payment for the liver transplant claiming that it was “experimental”.
The local community lashed out at Cigna’s initial decision to deny the procedure and picketed outside the local Cigna office. Finally, the health insurance company reversed its decision, but it was too late to save the girl.
This is a prime example of an insurance company putting profits over public safety. This poor girl’s parents have probably been paying monthly premiums into Cigna for years so that she could have adequate medical care.
To me, the tell-tale sign that this insurance company’s decision was wrong was the fact that the nurses and healthcare providers rallied against the insurance company. This tells me something is not right. These professionals have no personal stake in this dispute.
When a doctor has a procedure which may save a person’s life, why should the insurance company come between the doctor and the patient? What is “experimental”? Isn’t every major procedure in healthcare experimental?
Here, the health insurance company decided on its own that it was smarter and had more knowledge of the girl’s sickness, then her treating physician. The insurance company acted as if it was God and took the poor girl’s life.
Should the insurance company and its decision making executives be brought up on murder charges? What should the shareholders of Cigna do to the decision makers at Cigna? How do we fix this problem so it doesn’t happen again?
The author of this Blog, Philadelphia car accident lawyer, Michael L. Saile, Jr., Esq. of Saile & Saile LLP, Attorneys-at-Law focuses his practice on fighting for plaintiffs’ personal injury and car accident victim’s rights in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. We handle all serious injury cases including, car accidents (both limited and full tort), wrongful death, slip & fall downs, construction accidents, Septa, NJ Transit, and other cases other cases. We are located just outside of Philadelphia in lower Bucks County. We also handle Philadelphia plaintiffs’ personal injury and car accident cases. Please visit our personal injury only website at www.pa-nj-injurylawyer.com for more injury information.
What do the doctors have to say about it?
Something is missing from this story..
Lukemia attacks every organ in the body, the entire body. It starts in the production of bad bloodcells from bone marrow.
Did the girl have a bone marrow transplat?
How would it make sense to replace a liver in a person, just to have the kidney go down.. then the lungs , and then the heart.
unless there was a bone marrow transplant, and it was sucessful, a liver transplant makes absolutley no sense at all.
I know this cause my dad had the lukemia at age 70.
Chermotherapy does not help, .. doctors dont know what causes lukemia, and they really haVE NO CURE FOR IT.
The only thing that they can do is a bone marrow transplant, which is very dangerous and the survival rate is below 10 percent.
Because my dad was 70, they said a bone marrow transplant was not an option,… therefore, when the organs started shutting down it made no sense to do anything about that, cause what good are new organs if they are going to be supplied with bad blood.
see the point?
read up on mutltiple myeloma plasma cell lukemia.
The insurance company certainly did not kill this girl, from what little information is provided here.
Non one wants anyone to die, especially loved ones and all, an d especially children.
Sometimes there is nbothing that cn be done .
A liver transplant here certainly could of prolonged life anywhere from a week to 6 months, but there is no telling.
Lukemia is a desease of the blood. Once your bone marrow starts producing these bad blood cells, blasts, theres no way to fix it… the only they they can do is totally drain a persons bone marrow and put in good bone marrow from a donor. This good bone marrow will make good blood cells.
I feel this story is more about people’s emotions over a little girl dying than it is about medical science.
i am sure there are people that need new livers and will survive after the transplant, but these people do not have lukemia raging in their blood.
I went through a lot of emotions when my dad died from lukemia, and did a lot of research, and was angry to doctors couldnt save him.
However, i came to realize that lukemia is virtually impossible to cure or treat,… the only theing they can do is prolong life for a short time, but killing off blood cells with chemo, unless a bone marrow transplant is done and is sucessful, and even then its a low survival rate.
again, going around willy nilly replacing organs that have zero chance to survive because the blood that runs thiem is bad, well, is the wrong thing to do.
What many of the news articles fail to mention is that
1. Natalie was in a vegetative state that the transplant would have had no chance of reversing
and
2. The parents made the decision to remove her from life support due to the hopelessness of the situation.
Trust me, I am in no way a supporter of the insurance industry, I think it is borderline criminal how they can directly influence the medical care of people by not approving procedures. But I don’t feel that this case is a good one to use as the flagship for a war against the industry since it was the parents who pulled the plug on her. It just seems like they are grubbing for money after the fact now. Even if the ins company had initially approved the procedure, she would still be vegetative with little hope of recovery.
Tim:
Was she in the vegetative state at the time she needed the transplant? Or did the lack of the transplant force he into the vegetative state?
You are missing the bottom line here, the real contributing factor – the lukemia raging through her blood
I can’t find any article that describes exactly what caused the vegetative state, that’s a good question though. From what I gather, she received a bone marrow transplant and complications arose from this transplant, causing her liver to fail. After that, her condition worsened and she fell into the coma/vegetative state. It was then that the ins company refused the liver transplant, and her parents decided to pull the plug on her.
These insurance companies make me sick! What they did was basically murder this girl. You pay a premium every month (or however you pay quarterly/yearly) in anticipation that if something happens to you and you need expensive medical care that you are covered. I can see them making you go to doctors that they have pre-negotiated fees with, after all that helps keep the costs down, which they likely don’t pass on to the insured, but every penny they save helps us in the long run I guess, but getting back to the point… Cigna did this girl wrong and did her family wrong who was paying the bill to cover her, just in case this sort of thing should occur and guess what??? IT DID! and Cigna dropped the ball. They let this girl die by not Ok’ing the surgey which is B.S.! Why the heck do we pay these over priced insurance premiums for coverage if when we get sick the insurance company won’t cover our bill or ok the necessary surgery we require to get healthy again?? I hope that this girls’ family sues the pants off of Cigna and wins and puts them out of business. “Experimental”?? what is so “experimental” about a liver transpant? they do it all the time. maybe it was a goat liver or a pig liver or some other animal?…i dont know? but if it is that, there are a myriad of things that can go wrong with a “normal” transplant. The liver couldn’t take, an infection could spread, etc.. Point being, if the girl needs a liver and her payments are up to date, GIVE HER THE LIVER! Why can’t our country, the greatest country in the entire world, have a decent healthcare system in place to protect its citizens against stuff like this??? We as a country need to get on the ball and get our crap together with this healthcare system. If I had Cigna, i drop them like a $2 hooker at the wishy wash and get a new insurance company toot sweet. God forbid I have Cigna and need a hang nail fixed or get a cold!
Kevin, the insurance company did not give her lukemia. The insurance company did pay for the bone marrow transplant.
The bone marrow transplant , is an extremely dangerous procedure , and very costly in terms of dollars, but is the only course of action to cure someone from lukemia.
After the transplant, the patient fell into a coma and was dying.
If the doctors felt that a liver would of saved her, she would of had one, .. they wouldnt of thrown away all the money invested on the bone marrow trsansplant if they could of saved her.
In general, I have found that most people who lose loved ones to cancer initially have emotions and feelings that the doctors messed up. That more could have been done,.. but eventualy come to the realization that neither the doctors nor the insurance compan ies caused the illness, and they actually did what they could.
There are 2 people in the public eye that I know of that have been cured of lukemia,.. mel stottlemyer, former pitching coach of the mets and yankees, as well as the former manager for the chicago cubs, I forget his name.
This is extremely rare occurance however.
Take a look at the survival statistics on lukemia, do some research… wikipedia is a good place to start online.