Welcome to corporate America

This is pure horror:

Cigna refused to pay for a 17-year-old leukemia patient's liver transplant until the family staged a protest Thursday, but Nataline Sarkisyan died shortly after the reversal. ...

On Thursday, the family rallied supporters online and staged a protest at Cigna's Glendale office with about 150 people, including many members of the local Armenian community and the California Nurses Assn., which had released statements supporting the family's cause.

I can't imagine this family's pain, and what it must be like to know that your daughter's death may have been avoided if it hadn't been unprofitable to a corporation to try to do so.

But this is the reason I'm posting about it:

Later in the day, Cigna released a statement approving the transplant payment.

"Although it is outside the scope of the plan's coverage, and despite the lack of medical evidence regarding the effectiveness of such treatment," spokesman Wendell Potter wrote, "Cigna HealthCare has decided to make an exception in this rare and unusual case, and we will provide coverage should she proceed with the requested liver transplant. Our thoughts and payers [sic--but what an appropriate error] are with Nataline and her family at this time."

Even at this moment, after Cigna has been exposed as a haven of pure corporate greed and forced to relent, their spokesman goes to great lengths to assert that this is "outside the scope of the plan's coverage" and that this is only "an exception" they'll make for this "rare and unusual case"--so that their customers will understand very clearly that they shouldn't expect to receive critical medical care in the future just because Cigna was forced to back down this time around.  Or in other words, the next family with a seriously sick child that can't manage to rally 150 people outside of Cigna's headquarters may as well start planning the funeral right now.

Cigna's tagline, by the way, is "A Business of Caring®."

The lesson this teaches is by far the most important one to understand about corporations: they will do anything, whatsoever, for profit, including denying life-saving operations to teenagers or killing infants.  This is why corporate worship among American libertarians leaves me nonplussed, since I can't understand how they can reconcile a strong stand for individual freedoms with the abridgment of those freedoms that is the natural and inevitable result of allowing corporate power to go unchecked.

(Closely-related posting here.)

Comments

[Thomas Daulton]

In order to explain to you why Libertarians, Rand-ians etc. worship corporations in full knowledge of their tendency to arrogate individual freedoms unto themselves by denying freedom to others... I'm going to have to geek out on you. Are you familiar with the "Star Trek" race, the Ferengi, who figured prominently in the series "Deep Space 9" ? The Ferengi are, of course, ludicrously, satirically mercantile, hyper-capitalist, Ayn Rand's wet dream.

[paraphrase, not exact]... At one point Dr. Bashir is asking the Ferengi, Rom, why he continues to work for the other Ferengi, Quark, when Quark is clearly exploiting all his workers. Why don't you band together to stop the exploitation, or form your own competing business that wouldn't exploit you? Rom replies, with shock and horror, "No Ferengi wants to _STOP_ the exploitation!! Every Ferengi wants to be the one _DOING_ the exploiting!"

I think pretty much without exception, every Libertarian, every Rand-ian, AEI or Heritage Foundation conservative -- everyone who truly acts like they believe unbridled competition will result in the betterment of all people -- thinks themselves an automatic winner, they think (rightly or wrongly) that they will on the balance be the ones doing the exploiting rather than exploited.

They may be right about themselves, or they may be wrong. (But we have seen, with the Bush Administration, that business acumen, intelligence and competence in general are not necessarily predictive of how well you can exploit others under conditions of hypercapitalistic anarchy.)

[John Caruso]

Yes, I agree that there's some of that to it. And if not exploitation per se, I'm sure most libertarians feel like they'll be among the winners (and on the flip side I doubt there are any right-wing libertarians among those who think they'll be among the losers).

It's still a signal example of cognitive dissonance to me. To perceive concentrated power that's at least ostensibly exercised on behalf of the general populace as a danger, but also be unwilling or unable to perceive it as a danger when it's exercised solely for the financial benefit of unaccountable private institutions (which on their own would respect no limitations whatsoever—moral, ethical, or otherwise—on that single driving goal), is a real feat.