One story that we couldn’t keep out of the press and that contributed most to my decision to walk away from my career in 2008 involved Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient in California whose scheduled liver transplant was postponed at the last minute when Cigna told her surgeons it wouldn’t pay. Cigna’s medical director, 2,500 miles away from Ms. Sarkisyan, said she was too sick for the procedure. Her family stirred up so much media attention that Cigna relented, but it was too late. She died a few hours after Cigna’s change of heart.
Ms. Sarkisyan’s death affected me personally and deeply. As a father, I couldn’t imagine the depth of despair her parents were facing. I turned in my notice a few weeks later. I could not in good conscience continue being a spokesman for an industry that was making it increasingly difficult for Americans to get often lifesaving care.
One of my last acts before resigning was helping to plan a meeting for investors and Wall Street financial analysts — similar to the one that UnitedHealthcare canceled after Mr. Thompson’s horrific killing. These annual investor days, like the consumerism idea I helped spread, reveal an uncomfortable truth about our health insurance system: that shareholders, not patient outcomes, tend to drive decisions at for-profit health insurance companies.
If your job involves making decisions that are likely to lead to the deaths of thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other people, you have the moral obligation to consider what’s right. There’s no chance that people with those jobs haven’t thought about the effects of their actions. They are knowingly and willingly pressing the button that says to kill more people in order to make more money.
We agree it’s their job to do that. The fact that their job itself leads to immoral decisions is one issue, but that doesn’t absolve them of personal responsibility.
Do you honestly think that if all of the large healthcare CEOs were shot tomorrow that the people who replaced them would not think twice about the policies that led to said shootings? Just out of basic self-preservation they would cut back on some of the worst policies. Of course they would try to find other ways to get the same results. They would probably also beef up their own security teams. In other words, it would be a partial temporary solution, which is maybe better than no solution at all, but not as good as universal healthcare.