The Right to Choose
Some years ago after I had begun my own business I applied for medical insurance and was rejected. As I looked at the reasons for the rejection I thought they had confused me with someone else. My medical profile was unrecognizable to me, so much so that I called the underwriter who had evaluated my eligibility for coverage to make sure it was I. It was!
I had a neck disease, according to the letter, an illness that neither I nor my doctor knew anything about. And so the list went on, all conclusions which a medically unqualified person had extrapolated from a doctor’s notes which she wasn’t trained to understand. Worse still, she stubbornly stuck to her unqualified opinions. With the repetitive request of “Please transfer me to whomever you report to,” I moved up the chain of command until I reached the vice president of the company. Fortunately he got it, and I was granted my insurance. My neck pain which had lasted for about five days several years earlier had been connected with a flu virus. It had nothing to do with my general state of health. This is just one example of the inaccuracy of ignorance.
Just to clarify any confusion, I do not believe that any citizen of this country should be refused medical insurance because of a preexisting condition, real or otherwise. But that is not the purpose of this article. More to the point, some would say that my story about the insurance company just proves that government could do a better job. Could they? It has been widely discussed that at some point groups of government personnel will decide what treatment will be allowed or disallowed for a given individual under the new health care system. While it is true that insurance companies have been doing this for years, and have made mistakes, we have always had the choice to try other companies, pay for our own treatment if we can, or even to fall back on the available resources of our government. Now, if a governmental panel turns you down for a specific treatment, like dialysis or chemotherapy, what recourse do you have? The future of private insurance companies is tentative as is the legality of paying privately for medical services.
Even if the panel includes only medical personnel, the chance for mistakes is high. Unlike your relationship with your own physician, these doctors will never meet you, will not examine you, and may not even be doctors you would have chosen to be your doctor. By all these factors the chance for accuracy is diminished. Add to this the fact that many aspects of medicine are still not an exact science, and you will understand the need for a patient’s need to check and sometimes recheck the course of his or her diagnosis and care. You have the, may I use the word right, to choose your own way regarding your own health care. What if I had been stuck with the underwriter’s decision? And while I’m speculating, why is it that people who are so passionate about abortion rights, pro choice, where a life is sacrificed, don’t seem to be passionate about a patient’s right to choose treatment? What about a person’s right over their own body then? Do any of you really trust a detached, possibly inept panel to make life and death decisions for you?
Even qualified physicians make mistakes which can require you to choose someone else. Once when I had a bright red spot on my ankle bone, which grew increasing uncomfortable, I went at the last minute on a Friday afternoon to a doctor I had never seen before. He was part of a large group and had my chart because I had seen a colleague of his. He diagnosed it as an insect bite, which didn’t seem quite accurate to me. But then I didn’t really know what it was anyway. But when he wanted to treat a bite that I wasn’t sure was a bite with cortisone, which the chart clearly said I couldn’t tolerate, I decided to politely leave and find help somewhere else. It turned out that I had a third degree burn from a heating pad I had gone to sleep on. The pain had been minimized by its location on a bone, and the absence of that symptom had made it more difficult to diagnose, but obviously not impossible. My own instincts about my body, along with the right to choose, avoided some serious consequences, like necrosis and even amputation.
Any health care plan which even eventually takes away personal choice and leaves that choice to bureaucrats is essentially committing medical malpractice. Up to this present time world leaders, as well as people like you and me, have come from all over the world to the United States when they are seriously ill. There must be something right about the way we are doing it. Make it even better if you want to, but don’t become nihilistic and destroy an already good system.
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For more of Elizabeth Skoglund’s writing, please visit her Books page.