Sanctity of Life

A patient who was refused a liver transplant due to Arizona Governor Jan Brewer’s decision to cut the state benefit that would have made the transplant possible, has died. The patient had been scheduled for the needed transplant but was dropped from the waiting list on October 1st when the cuts went into effect. The Arizona budget that previously provided transplants to people in need was $1.4 million. As there were 99 people on the waiting list for transplants at the time the cuts went into effect, the net result is that the State of Arizona valued each of these lives at something less than $14,000 a person. Today, there are only 97 on the waiting list as two have passed away.

A 17-year-old girl named Nataline Sarkisyan was in desperate need of a transplant after receiving aggressive treatment that cured her recurrent leukemia but caused her liver to fail. Without a new organ, she would die in a matter of a days; with one, she had a 65 percent chance of surviving. Her doctors placed her on the liver transplant waiting list. When the perfect liver became available a few days after she was put on the list, doctors could not operate. Her survival did not depend on the availability of an organ or her clinicians or even the quality of care she received. It rested on her health insurance company. Cigna had denied the initial request to cover the costs of the liver transplant. And the insurer persisted in its refusal, claiming that the treatment was “experimental” and unproven, and despite numerous pleas from Nataline’s physicians to the contrary. The company reversed its decision. But the change came too late. Nataline died just a few hours after Cigna authorized the transplant. A nursing colleague who had cared for Nataline recounted “This was a 17-year-old girl,” she said. “How could anyone with a conscience — anyone who is human — do this to another person?”

In articles, interviews, op-eds and testimony on Capitol Hill, Wendell Potter has described the dark underbelly of the health care insurance industry — unkept promises of care, canceled coverage of those who get sick and fearmongering campaigns designed to quash any change that might adversely affect profits. He should know what he is talking about. For 20 years, Mr. Potter was the head of corporate communications at two major insurers, first at Humana and then at Cigna. Nataline’s death proved to be the final straw for Mr. Potter. “It became clearer to me than ever that I was part of an industry that would do whatever it took to perpetuate its extraordinarily profitable existence,” he writes. “I had sold my soul.”

Obama has said " Scripture tells us that there is evil in the world and that terrible things happen for reasons that defy human understanding...Bad things happen..."

Yet it was not accidental fate nor a deranged killer who condemned transplant patients to death. Who sheds the tear for them , Mr President, when promised health reform became a pact with the Devil ?