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Comment by kemiller2002 | Hacker News Reader

kemiller2002

My coworker's dad had this happen to him. He got Hep C through a blood transfusion for a routine surgery. The insurance company waited until he was almost dead before starting the treatment. Now his liver is in such bad shape that if he has any alcohol it will kill him. Ridiculous, especially since they were going to pay for it anyway.

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Doctors should be the ones making the medical decisions, not the faceless employees working with spreadsheets at insurance companies. Our system is backwards and needs to be overhauled.

Seems like you wouldn’t like universal healthcare then, where such things happen to _everybody_.

Stephen Hawking would have disagreed vehemently with you. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/i-would-not-...

And Charlie Gard would have disagreed with Stephen had the court not decided that he should die.

There is another high profile ALS sufferer in the US: Jason Becker, a super virtuoso guitarist popular in the 80s, tragically afflicted at the very peak of his ability. Still alive, still writing music, but can’t move anything but his eyes or breathe. No one sentenced him to death or anything.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Becker

In a for profit company, the point of the people evaluating your policy against needed care is essentially to find ways to deny you as much care as possible. In a universal system, the motivations aren't organized around whether a profit will be made or not and so the public (rather than private) bureaucrats will at least not be actively trying to kill or otherwise immiserate you. As an additional check on their behavior, the organization is directly accountable to elected representatives, very unlike the private system.

He's lucky they let him live. Sometimes the insurance companies don't let you live. Yet idiots talk about how the government will decide who lives and who dies if we have universal healthcare. These same idiots are clearly not aware that companies are making such life and death decisions every day for their customers, placing profit above human life constantly.

This is the kind of society half of America wants to build, one where the value of human lives is much less than the value of corporate profits. Well, we're already there and it's some fucking disgusting shit indeed. It's really fucking nasty when the insurance company says we're not paying for your dad's hospital stay anymore despite what the doctors want and then he dies the first full day he's out of the hospital. Might as well just let all the murderers out of jail. I'm sure they would if someone could profit from the ensuing mayhem like insurance companies currently profit off of murder.

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