Updated:2024-12-21 07:21 Views:59
When Brian Thompson was shot to death, something strange — and disturbing — happened: The gunman was lauded. Why? Because his victim was the C.E.O. of one of the largest health insurance companies in the country. And so the shooter, observers assumed, must be a victim of those companies.
Friends of the man accused of the killing have said that he suffered from sometimes debilitating back pain. And while the gunman’s motives remain unknown and might always be obscure, this is precisely the sort of medical issue that could lead one to detest the opaque, fractured American health care system and the insurers who profit by denying and delaying coverage for expensive treatments. Observers who share this anger have turned the accused man into a folk hero, sharing gleeful rage about the health system.
The celebration of the gunman suggests that many people believe the killing was justified. Since I’m going to argue that this is deeply and importantly wrong, I expect that many readers will think, “It sounds like you’ve never lived with real pain or had to navigate the labyrinthine hellscape that is our health care and insurance system.” I wish that were the case.
In 2015, my foot was blown apart in a motorcycle accident. I was told that I would probably lose the foot, but somehow doctors pulled it back together over the course of six surgeries. After the first five surgeries, I was given terrible advice about how to wean off my opioid medication and endured 29 days of agonizing withdrawal. I was told I’d never walk again, but with years of physical therapy, I graduated from walker to cane to walking unassisted. To this day, I live with varying amounts of pain, and I always will.
The American health care system being what it is, my partner and I spent years fighting with insurance companies to cover all aspects of my care. After one of my surgeries, I was surprised by an unexpected piece of mail, hand-delivered by a courier. The letter was a bill from just one of my hospitals, for just one of my surgeries, for an astronomical amount. My insurance company had denied coverage.
It took dozens of hours over the course of weeks to settle this bill, which happened when someone at the insurance company finally spotted the administrative error that led to the denial of coverage. To add insult to injury, I learned that the amount the hospital charged my insurance company was a fraction of what the hospital had charged me in that hand-delivered bill.
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