Word: transplant
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...vitro fertilization wasn't the only technique making reproductive news last week. The medical wires were buzzing as well with reports of the first human uterine transplant--an improbable operation that raises more questions than it answers...
...measure of popular passion on the subject is that the movie John Q.--in which Denzel Washington plays an underinsured father holding a hospital at gunpoint to get his son a heart transplant--was No. 1 at the box office during its opening weekend in late February. When the movie came out, the HMO industry's lobbying group bought full-page newspaper ads blaming Washington politicians for failing to address the problems of the uninsured. There's not much evidence, however, that anyone in Washington is paying attention. "While there's conversation going on," says John Engler, Michigan's Republican...
...good idea to pick up a gun, take over the emergency room of a hospital and threaten to kill your family's cardiac surgeon. But that's what Denzel Washington's character does in the film John Q. when his son is denied the heart transplant he needs to survive. And if box-office reaction is any indication, plenty of frustrated health-care consumers have at least fantasized about doing the same thing: John Q., released in late February, hit No. 1 in its first week and stayed near the top. But does HMO hell really get this...
...good news is that most of us will never find ourselves in quite the medical crisis the John Q. family does. In the movie, which was written in 1993, during the Clinton health-care-reform battle, the parents are told that a heart transplant costs $250,000, that their insurance doesn't cover it and that they're required to post a $75,000 deposit or their sick son will be sent packing. While it's true that hospitals expect to be reimbursed for services provided to even the neediest and most grievously ill patients, it's not true that...
First of all, with 2,200 heart transplants performed in the U.S. each year, the procedure is no longer considered experimental; most policies today cover it. More important, those patients whose policies place restrictions on their transplant coverage and those who have no insurance at all are not simply turned away. (Even prisoners are entitled; in January a 31-year-old felon serving time in a California prison received a heart transplant that it is estimated could cost that state's taxpayers some $400,000, if not more.) Transplant hospitals keep on staff financial advisers who work with insurance companies...