Health insurers a major obstacle to humane health care

April 16, 2009
Connecticut Post
Letters to the Editor

In the April 16 article, “Health-care system ills under examination” , Claudia Gruss MD, president of the Fairfield County Medical Association pointed out that increasingly patients do not have the money to spare for the co-pay on their office visits. Some patients simply do not go to see their doctors until they either get better on their own or the problem gets so bad that they end up in the emergency room with a complication such as pneumonia which could have been prevented had they been seen earlier. This could even end in death.

Private health insurance is expensive because insurance companies are large corporations that are under pressure to generate profits for their shareholders, not to mention the multimillion dollar salaries for some of their CEOs. Putting profits ahead of patients’ interests makes for an irresponsible health system. Insurance companies are not interested in treating patient with dignity or humanely. To them patients are statistical numbers on profit and loss charts, and little else. That is why they raise their premiums every year. It also explains why some have had to be sued by the American Medical Association for using underhanded methods to cheat doctors out of fair payment for their services. One wonders how it ever got this bad. Who was sleeping at the wheel?

Clearly, a health system must, before anything else be a humane system, not a cold corporate one that makes people fear bankruptcy should they become seriously ill. Until insurers’ greed is controlled it will be impossible to change the system for the better.

Edward J .Volpintesta MD