I don't even know what to say - unbelievable!

The country should offer a peaceful death in lieu of having to vote for one of the present candidates ... just kidding.

“Treatment of advanced cancer that is meant to prolong life, or change the course of this disease, is not a covered benefit of the Oregon Health Plan,” said the unsigned letter Wagner received...

WTF?!

treat your cancer? nah, that'll only prolong your life. but hey - you had a good run...

"When the Oregon Health Plan was established in 1994, it was expressly intended to ration health care."

"Taxpayer dollars are limited for publicly funded programs."

"coverage of palliative care for patients with advanced cancer would not include chemotherapy or surgical intervention intended primarily to prolong life or alter disease progression."

"She was particularly upset because the letter of denial said that doctor-assisted suicide would be covered. "

There is so much wrong with this, I don't know where to start.

“My perspective is, if it works it works,” he said. “What is six months of life worth? To me it’s worth a lot. -Barbara Wagner

Rock on lady!

6 months is the world to her!!

This is why I am against government run health care. It's only a matter of time before some heartless idiot gets control of it.

Not necessarily. I quite enjoy government run health care, and I'm not at all worried about a heartless idiot running ours. I think it all depends on the government/nation running the health care.

Here is the issue.

Countless people in this nation of wealth (however distributed) do not have insurance, would not receive this treatment, and likely would not have seen a doctor in the first place. Even minor-meds will rob you if you don't have insurance. Someone with decent private insurance, however, would surely have their chemo treatment covered.

Suggesting PAS, however, even if noted only for informative purposes, was just in bad taste. And if their program ever suggested that it was comprehensive and had great breadth, then that is not so good, either.

Every economy has been a mixture of public and private. Public health care is great, and can succeed by providing basic and fundamental care. I think it will be harder, though, to be successful where specialized and long-term treatment are concerned. The balance between public and private does not have to be zero-sum.

Nonetheless, it is in the interest of the vast majority of individuals to have some program (any) that provides for all citizens to visit a general physician.

Public care should cover general care; and private coverage should be mandatory of every employer. The private insurance, which would then not have to cover general care, should be a bit less expensive. Insurance companies, in any case, would need an ethics and profit overhaul to make this necessity affordable.

Maybe charging 4 thousand dollars a month for medication that helps cancer victims is umm... immoral. I wonder what a board member of the insurance company would do if it they had a family member with recurring lung cancer and offered doctor-assisted suicide. How disgusting.

Isn't this one of a prime example of what is wrong with the US health care system.

No other (Western) country has such a system as the US's. And is a system that has failed from the beginning.

Hope that the next president (Probably Obama) sees the light, and change the system for good. If a country can fight a war worth more then 500 billion dollars ( that's only the Iraq war, excluding the Afghanistan war) in less then 5 years, why can't it cough up the money to keep their own people healthy ?

What makes anyone think that private insurance would cover this? I am willing to bet a year's salary that she'd have been dropped from private insurance a long time ago.

Sometimes, people will die. Sometimes, they will live. She has already lived beyond the expectations of her doctors. She was a smoker.

And the headline on this is completely slanted. It wasn't as if they were suggesting that she just off herself instead.

Government funded insurance is no different from private, private insurance will drop you in a heart beat...see plenty of previous posts about it. The difference is, they won't fund your way out of pain either, at least Oregon offered alternatives (and yes, one alternative was doctor-assisted suicide).

I just don't get why if it's taxpayer funded everyone thinks it's wrong but if a private insurer does the same thing "they're just making good business sense".

I call bulls**t.

Failed in what regard?
Research institutes and especially insurance companies are doing very well.
That was the purpose of the US health care system. It works as intended.
US is a democracy, or at least a republic. If people wanted a better system they would have voted accordingly.

BS. The Healthcare system was never voted by the people to begin with.
And since no president since even offered a change, how democratic is that ?

The healthcare system is a failure, not because it doesn't work as intended, but BECAUSE it DOES work as intended.

Bingo.

Universal health care is like the postal service. If everyone is paying then the cost is minimal. I am all for this type of system. I feel that health care is better than no health care. Also, this article is genius. The best way to get an insurance company to cover your medical expenses is to make it public. They want to save face and come off as the good guy. So, just as soon as I am denied something I feel is extremely unjust you can bet your ass I'm going straight to the media. The only way to fix a problem like this is to expose them of their wrong-doings.

The postal service has one thing that UHC would not: competition. UHC, as proposed, is bad for the same reasons that monopolies are bad. Taking abuses public will not help if non-elected officials are running the show and you have no alternatives. Can't vote them out, can't go elsewhere, so suck it up. Public health care may work for other countries, but I have serious reservations about how it will work in America, given the evidence we have available for current programs.

As long as people have choices in who they get their insurance through, publicity works wonders on those companies that drop people the moment they have a claim. Nobody wants to pay for a service they are almost guaranteed not to get.

Insurance companies, like unions, started out as a great and helpful idea, but fell into the wrong hands. The old co-op idea was that a group of people got together and pooled monetary resources in the event one of them suffered a tragic loss or something that would cause them to go bankrupt if they had to handle it on their own. As the group got bigger, bureaucracy crept in and so did fraud. There were charlatans that made false claims against the group's funds and unscrupulous managers that used the fund as their own personal piggy bank. Compounding this was the fact that when you hide the true cost from the end consumer, the price tends to increase in complete disregard to what is happening in the prevailing market. Insured people stopped paying attention to how much the cost of medical care was, since in their mind it was someone else paying for it. This placed artificial inflationary pressure on the price of medical care, with uninsured people eventually being priced right out of the market, as we see today.

AFLAC does have coverage for things like this, btw. A guy I used to work with got some nice payouts from them even though he pretty much drank himself to death. Yes, it's supplemental coverage, but it will help in the event of catastrophic illness.

(now, to wait for my commission check to arrive... :p)

Anyone who still believes the U.S. is a democracy or a republic, raise their hands. That's what I thought!

If you live in this country and you are poor, then you are purely at the mercy of God as to how long you live. Healthcare is a business and the bottom line is all that matters. A business has no heart or compassion. It doesn't matter one bit to it whether we live or die.