Name your price

For anyone who's seen Sicko this is familiar territory, but it's still awful stuff:

Patsy Bates, a 51-year-old Gardena hairdresser, is suing Health Net for $6 million because it revoked her policy in January 2004 while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer.

Bates said she was left with nearly $200,000 in medical bills and had to delay the chemotherapy for four months until a charity program paid for the treatment.

Here are some more details from another article:

The documents showed Health Net saved $35.5 million in "unnecessary" health care expenses for rescinding more than 1,000 policies between 2000 and 2006. At the same time, a Health Net analyst received about $21,000 in bonuses for her work, which included exceeding company goals for policy rescissions.

But this was the part that really struck me:

Health Net analyst Barbara Fowler, who conducted Bates' investigation, exceeded the company's 2002 goal of 15 rescissions a month by averaging 22.9. Fowler's rescission successes were repeatedly lauded in her performance evaluations, which noted she saved the company $5.5 million in 2002 for rescinding 275 contracts. Her bonuses ranged from $1,654 in 2001 to a high of $6,310 in 2005.

There are a few things we can tell from this.  First, it was Fowler's job, day in and day out, to deny treatment to sick people when they need it the most, and she was good at it--throwing 275 people out on the street in 2002 (95 more than the company's goal for her).  Second, if she was particularly effective at causing additional suffering to these sick people, she was rewarded for it.  Third, the bonuses she received for exceeding her monthly goal of human suffering were on the order of 0.1% of the amount of money that she saved Health Net.  And fourth, even if we err on the high side by using her highest bonus of $6,310 as the total for 2002, the amount of money she collected for each of the 95 people she canceled over and above the company's target was $66.42.

But it's actually far worse than that:

Health Net's attorney, William Helvestine, said no more than $276 of that bonus in any year was based on cancellations.

Again, using $276 as the total for 2002, each of those additional 95 cancellations netted Fowler $2.91.

Which leads to the question: how much money would it take for you to put 95 people through the kind of suffering that Patsy Bates went through as she desperately tried to find a way to get treatment for her breast cancer?  They say that everyone has a price--and for Barbara Fowler, that price is apparently a little less than three dollars per person.

I don't mean to single out Fowler, though; if it weren't her, there'd be someone else right there to collect the bounty of $2.91 a head.  The real problem is a system that puts people in the position where their own economic interests lie at odds with the most basic forms of empathy and common decency...and that's a problem that goes far beyond health care.

Comments

[Save the Oocytes]

Fowler has to watch out, though, for immigrant labor. I hear if you hire "illegals," the really desperate ones, you can assassinate the sickly at $2 a pop.

[Thomas Daulton]

Forget the immigrants, it sounds like a computer could simply sit there and cut people's policies. Then Fowler herself would be out of a job and ergo out of health insurance... bitter irony.

For an interesting account of how computer technology may be almost ready to replace even what we think of as high-level professional jobs, see Marshall Brain's novel, "Manna" (free on the Internet)