Insurance Won't Pay; Girl Dies

This is exhibit A of everything wrong with the U.S. approach to healthcare. The family had health insurance, but the girl was denied a transplant (claiming it was "experimental") because of the cost of the operation. Under pressure from bad publicity, the insurance company changed it's mind and authorized the operation--but the girl died before it could be performed.

This is why plans to cover more people or even all citizens are band-aids. The only real solution is to make health care a right, and take profits out of the equation. We need a single-payer, not-for-profit healthcare system like every other industrial democracy. The only presidential candidate proposing such a system is Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). (See his healthcare plan here.) Obama's healthcare plan doesn't even cover everyone. The Edwards & Clinton health care plans (which are modeled after the Nixon plan), although Edwards seems to be trying to build to a single-payer system in steps. At least he knows that one cannot "negotiate" a good system with the HMOs and insurance companies--because, as this tragedy shows, they are the problem. They make money by denying claims and by covering only low-risk insurees, denying anything for preexisting conditions, etc.

There is more support among voters for a single-payer system because it is easier to understand, saves money from lack of redtape, and is the only plan that restores medicine to its rightful place and focus: the health of patients rather than the profits of Big Pharma, insurance companies, and Med Tech companies. We the people of this country must demand, not universal health coverage, but universal, not-for-profit healthCARE as a right. Medicine and healthcare should be distributed to those who need it--not by market means. Market-based distribution for medicine is an example of the rule of money outside its proper sphere--as obscene as prostitution (the distribution of sexual intimacy by market means), bribing the police or courts (the distribution of legal "justice" by market means), or simony (the distribution of clergy or political office by market means).

Healthcare workers: doctors, nurses, lab techs, etc., have a vocation, a calling--similar to a religious vocation. For profit healthcare systems distort this and turn healthcare workers into snake-oil vendors and quackery peddlers--preying on the poor. It is obscene and ought to outrage us.

Quality healthcare is a human right and it is high time U.S. citizens demand it!