Healthcare for all

Published: Saturday December 29, 2007

The death, this week, of Nataline Sarkisyan, 17, who was waiting for a liver transplant, is a sad reminder of the deep-rooted problems in the healthcare system in the United States.

It is often noted that 47 million Americans have no health insurance. That's a disgrace for a wealthy nation. The circumstances of Nataline's death remind us that the other 250 million who do have insurance "may be denied its benefits at the time they are needed most, in literal life-or-death situations," as the Trenton Times put it in an editorial this week.

Armenian-Americans joined California nurses in demonstrating outside the offices of the company that insured Nataline. In doing so, they helped put pressure on the company to reverse its decision to deny coverage of the transplant Nataline's doctors said she needed. The company reversed course, but too late.

Now we can do more: we can work toward an overhaul of an unhealthy healthcare system.

In defending the status quo, the insurance industry raises red flags about available alternatives, telling horror stories about the healthcare systems of other industrialized countries. In every industrialized country, people have universal access to healthcare, costs are significantly lower than in the United States, and life expectancy and other measures of the quality of care are comparable to those in the United States.

And it's not like we don't have horror stories to tell here in the United States.

Most of us are grateful to physicians, midwives, nurses and other healthcare providers for being there for us with their expertise and their compassion when we need them the most. But we are also witness to the problems resulting from pressure brought to bear on them and us by a bloated private insurance industry.

As the cost of healthcare and of health insurance skyrockets, it is tempting to defend cost-cutting decisions of the sort Nataline's insurer initially made. Many an expensive test or procedure is ordered because money is no object when the insurer will pay for whatever the doctor orders, and the individual doctor and patient have every interest in being as thorough as possible. Managing costs is a good thing.

But it is worth remembering that administrative costs - such as the cost of maintaining a staff to bill and track each of numerous different health insurance companies - account for a quarter of the cost of healthcare in the United States.

Moving into the new year, with the U.S. presidential primaries and elections, we hope that Nataline's tragedy will help all of us remain focused on the need for fundamental healthcare reform in the United States.

Meanwhile we express our heartfelt condolences to Natalie Sarkisyan's family.