Innumerable, extremely sick Americans have heard the empty phrases “out of network” and “medically unnecessary,” from avaricious powerhouses that have usurped the lives of our fellow Americans. The current US health care system does not only plague the 47 million currently uninsured but also those with a health insurance plan.
One such example is Dawn Smith, a young woman who suffers from two brain tumors. Dawn has been continuously denied the medical care that doctors say is critical to save her life. Three doctors from three renowned health care systems in the metro Atlanta area informed Dawn that her “only chance for a cure was to see a specialist at Cleveland Clinic or Washington University’s Center for Advanced Medicine.” Yet, her health insurance company, CIGNA, has denied these essential treatments.
Dawn calls the insurance company callous and expresses her feeling of complete “insignificance,” when being repeatedly denied care after she was diagnosed with the brain tumors in 2005 and 2007. Dawn had religiously paid her insurance premiums for six years.
Dawn states in a letter she wrote to H. Edward Hanway, CEO of CIGNA, “Meanwhile, my symptoms worsen. Debilitating electric-shock-type pain racks my body and shoots through my head. I have sudden, painful seizures, sometimes knocking me to the ground. The seizure medications barely help, while their side effects ravage my body.”
Dawn has suffered from severe pain and the foreboding threat of death simply because these profit-driven insurance companies have decided that they don’t feel like forking over the cash to this critically ill patient. What a travesty!
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