Blaming Obamacare is the wrong diagnosis

The Wall Street Journal began the week by publishing a provocative essay in which a young man suggested Obamacare kept his mother from getting appropriate medicine for her cancer. The writer crafted a poignant story about his mother, who sounds like a good person with a bad disease.
Mainstream media buzzes with these types of stories. The Obamacare-is-the-problem narrative fits quite well on conservative news outlets.
The problem, as it so often is, is in the details.
The story here begins with a familiar first chapter: the writer’s mother had good insurance coverage but then it was cancelled. Next came her struggle to find a new policy on the federal exchange. The cancer patient ultimately learned that Humana would no longer cover her twice-monthly injections, and this left her with $14,000 in medical bills just two months into 2014.
I’m not sure what it was about this essay that stirred my journalistic self. Maybe it was the writer’s overuse of hyperbole (Procrustes, really?). Or that I expected more from the WSJ. Or that I’m trained to diagnose problems correctly, and blaming Obamacare for everything only delays fixing the real problems with American healthcare.
Though this case involves a specific drug for a rare cancer, the larger story centers on value, and evidence, and who pays for convenience, and this: why does an old drug cost so much?
A good place to start is to ask why Humana would deny coverage for this woman’s cancer drug?
The debate ...

Source: Dr John M - February 25, 2014 Category: Cardiology Authors: Dr John Source Type: blogs