A Serious Look at Health Insurance

Another staggeringly impossible picture: if a patient requires and is able to secure a “pre-authorization” for a critical test or treatment, one is often faced with the alarming paradox that the “authorization” he or she has received may not, ultimately, be valid. It actually defies logic when you consider the process of the patient waiting for the insurance company to approve a particular procedure only to be told that the “authorization” is not “guaranteed?” Consider, too, that any patient who is in a situation in which his or her health or fate may rest on an “early” diagnosis and the factor of terrible stress rears its painful and disturbing head. It’s a miserable situation for both patient and physician, because the physician is not being allowed to provide the patient adequate care, at the very least.

Worst of all, perhaps, is the vexing question of whether or not it can be right that insurance companies have dramatically changed the landscape of medical care for all Americans? And disturbingly can we ask the dreaded question of whether the insurance company executives are profiting greatly at the expense of America’s physicians and the public?

As we all watch the quality of medical care deteriorate as doctors are unable to work under these kinds of constraints or tolerate this situation, what can ordinary citizens do? Until the lives and health care of politicians and those they love are directly impacted by this crisis in health care, I fear that nothing will change.