Trading Human Life for Greed

It is appalling that parents, like young, Pennsylvania mother Stacie Ritter, are forced to claim bankruptcy trying to care for their young children afflicted with cancer.

Ms. Ritter’s twins were both diagnosed with cancer at age four. The cancer treatments that they received severely damaged the glands controlling their growth. Her family’s health insurance company, CIGNA, has refused to cover the growth hormone injections required for the twin’s ability to grow, citing that their physician claims the twins do not need the treatments. Consequently, each time Stacie takes her daughters to the doctor for their shots it costs her family $440.00. As a result of her children’s cancer treatments and denied care by her insurance company, Stacie and her husband have been forced to file for bankruptcy.

Meanwhile…. health insurance company CEO’s such as United Health Group’s Stephen Hemsley earn 57K an hour.

This is unethical, unjust and infringes upon the basic human right of having access to quality, affordable health care without having to go into debt. It is also outrageous how these insurance companies insist on using their own physicians in order to deny essential health care coverage to individuals, especially young children!

The public option for American families is the only way to fully prevent the continued abuses of insurance companies. Instead, the health care bill that the senate is debating now appears to be trying to exclude the public option, which is exactly what insurance companies want! Even, Wendell Potter, Cigna’s former communications director states “the industry is close to achieving its two major aims: defeating the public option and winning a mandate that would require all adults to purchase health insurance.”

It is imperative Congress listens to the needs of the American people when passing the new health care bill and NOT the desires of the profit-driven insurance companies. The public option is desperately needed as a competitor to reform the current health insurance system and to work to make insurance companies honest and ethical.

The scare tactics that the right-wing has used to insist that the public option will lead to a horrible health care system are entirely unfounded and have been insidiously implemented by the insurance companies to protect their profits at the expense of the American people.

Congress must consider their constituents and not their campaign financial contributors when passing the health care bill. If not, more individuals will continue to go bankrupt or even loose their lives just because they can not “afford” health care. Congress must realize one cannot put a price tag on human life!

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Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future