Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 SiCKO" profiles a number of Americans with insurance who have been denied needed care by their insurance companies, describes how the insurance-based healthcare system is structured to keep it that way, and provides examples of other industrialized nations where insurance companies do not stand in the way of medical care.
The campaign will highlight the need for reforms that prevent insurance companies from denying care, and send a strong signal to politicians in Congress, state capitals, and the presidential race who are promoting insurance-based reforms. |
Anne Harrington
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 To make matters worse, physicians don't want to take care of these people, and insurance companies don't want to pay for their care.1
So doctors become impatient and insurance companies skeptical when confronted with "patients like Linda," who make no sense, conceptually, to physicalist medicine. Meanwhile, the legions of Lindas in our society continue to suffer. Do any genuinely effective or empowering options exist for them?
The shortcomings of physicalist medicine, however, do not end there. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| It is rumored that government and private insurance companies are awaiting the successful completion of this study. With results to validate their requirements, government and insurance companies might then be able to deny medical coverage to any diabetic whose monthly monitoring data does not measure up to industry standards of tight control.
What such a study fails to take into account, though, is the very individualistic nature of tight control. An article listed on 1 cites such recognition by R.M. Cohen, M.D. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| The very idea that drug companies and insurance companies are right now profiting from disease and sickness is bewildering. Shouldn't health care be more concerned about the health of the people than the profits of the wealthy elite?
As I said in a previous article, no nation that neglects the health of its people can expect to have a future. America's current system of medicine has clearly abandoned the needs of its people while protecting the profits of influential corporations who run health care today (Big Pharma, insurance companies, hospitals and so on). |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 However, insurance companies are very reluctant to pay for this kind of medical care, even though many times specialists in environmental medicine can see patients and relieve symptoms that haven't been helped by all the other medical specialists. They pay for medical care that does not help and don't pay for care that does help. We must ask why. insurance companies say environmental medicine is experimental and anecdotal. |
| Insurance companies should be delighted because, in the long run, this approach saves an enormous amount of their money, as well as preserving the wellbeing and preventing the heartache for so many patients and family members."
"Insurance companies are reluctant to pay the environmental specialist, but will very quickly pay the hospital. Each day in the hospital can cost $1000. The total cost for environmental treatment of a serious condition would be much less than a week in the hospital.
Dr. Rapp describes the changes she has witnessed through environmental approaches. |
| That individual stands a chance of remaining well and not needing drugs or hospitalization once the true cause has been identified and eliminated. insurance companies should be delighted because, in the long run, this approach saves an enormous amount of their money, as well as preserving the wellbeing and preventing the heartache for so many patients and family members."
"Insurance companies are reluctant to pay the environmental specialist, but will very quickly pay the hospital. Each day in the hospital can cost $1000. |
Bill Sardi
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 But the self-serving cancer industry thinks it is a good idea to submit bills to insurance companies for more mammograms.
Does sunscreen use prevent skin cancer?
When Americans were surveyed, 43% said that sunscreen use can prevent skin cancer. The American Cancer Society says the public has a poor understanding of how to use sunscreens.
The ACS says: "The use of sunscreen on a daily basis is a good practice for reducing skin cancer risk. The problem with it is that it can sometimes give a false sense of security. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 They had to refer their patients to specialists who appeared on a list of insurance companies' "in-network" doctors, whatever that meant—all they knew was they were sending their patients to doctors they had never met and therefore couldn't entirely trust.To top it off, long-standing patients, people they had nursed through ailments and divorces and car accidents, were no longer allowed to see them. |
| At the same time, health care was highly fragmented, with hundreds of different businesses: hospitals, doctors, HMOs, medical device companies, assisted living centers, pharmacies, testing facilities, and insurance companies. There was little coordination between all the moving parts and huge inefficiencies in the system. Wall Street began to envision a new business model for medicine, one that would put money into investors' pockets. Remaking this sector offered what Investment Dealers' Digest called a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for creative investment bankers. |
Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr., M.D.
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 For instance, we can approach insurance companies, employers, and representatives of labor with a modest proposition: that heart patients targeted for the mechanical intervention of bypass surgery or stenting should first try twelve weeks of arrest-and-reverse therapy—plant-based nutrition plus, where necessary, cholesterol-reducing drug therapy. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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 It is expensive, insurance companies do not always cover it, and if your results are positive, insurance companies may choose to deny you coverage.
Q People with breast cancer have been found to have lower than normal levels of vitamin E and the mineral selenium, two important antioxidants that work together to neutralize free radicals. Selenium has been shown in lab studies to kill tumors and protect healthy tissue. Research has also shown that people with cancer of the lung, bladder, breast, colon, and skin all have lower than normal levels of vitamin A. |
Anne Harrington
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| So doctors become impatient and insurance companies skeptical when confronted with "patients like Linda," who make no sense, conceptually, to physicalist medicine. Meanwhile, the legions of Lindas in our society continue to suffer. Do any genuinely effective or empowering options exist for them?
The shortcomings of physicalist medicine, however, do not end there. Sometimes a patient can present with a disease that all agree is real, but the patient is then informed that little or nothing can be done about it. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
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 Add to that the fact that most of today's doctors spend more of their time filling out paperwork and arguing with insurance companies than they do treating patients and you have a perfect storm for information overload. In today's medical marketplace, it's unrealistic to expect your plastic surgeon to know much about bone diseases, or your ear, nose, and throat specialist to know much about OB-GYN.
So how could we expect any of them to know about naturopathy, acupuncture, or vitamins? |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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 At the turn of the twentieth century, insurance companies began to employ physicians to conduct such examinations. War played a role in the acceptance of this practice. During World Wars I and II, physical exams were used to assess the fitness of military recruits (these exams showed a "disconcertingly high percentage of physical defects among supposedly healthy young men"12) and were required annually for all officers of the army and navy.
The practice became common and expedient. |
Phyllis A. Balch, CNC
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| It is expensive, insurance companies do not always cover it, and if your results are positive, insurance companies may choose to deny you coverage.
Q People with breast cancer have been found to have lower than normal levels of vitamin E and the mineral selenium, two important antioxidants that work together to neutralize free radicals. Selenium has been shown in lab studies to kill tumors and protect healthy tissue. Research has also shown that people with cancer of the lung, bladder, breast, colon, and skin all have lower than normal levels of vitamin A. |
Bill Sardi
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| Craig Earle of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, American Society of Clinical Oncology, Atlanta, June 2006; Associated Press, June 2, 2006]
With no treatment options remaining, and insurance companies withholding approval for experimental cancer treatments, cancer patients sometimes seek publicity in an attempt to pry loose insurance funds for care. Families of cancer patients often don't understand why insurance won't cover everything that can be tried, even unproven treatments, in an attempt to save the life of their loved ones. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Angry with the people he still had to do battle with every day at insurance companies, most of whom were clerks, who were arguing with him over whether or not a sick child, his patient, needed to go to the hospital or take an expensive drug or undergo a test. He was angry at parents who failed to show up for appointments. He found himself resenting the mothers who came in with their printouts from the Internet wanting to talk endlessly about some disease their child did not have. |
| Of course, that's assuming that doctors and insurance companies know how safe and effective drugs really are. In the debate over prescription drug prices, drug safety, and oversight from the FDA, the assumption has been that everybody has access to the same data and that everybody, from drug safety officers to doctors to insurers, is equally capable of assessing the merits and dangers of a drug. That's not the case. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Aided by the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, which allowed banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to join together under one holding company umbrella, the big were getting bigger.
Growing as large as possible made sense, considering how the too-big-too-fail doctrine had been restructured under FDICIA. More than likely, those that were unequivocally classified as TBTF would be bailed out if circumstances took an ugly turn. Most people assumed that Washington would find it politically unpalatable to allow one of the nation's largest financial institutions to go under. |
Tori Hudson, N.D.
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 There is some evidence that a heel test is 85 to 90 percent accurate compared with the bone density of the hip on a DXA scan. Many insurance companies do not cover routine osteoporosis screening for women under 65 unless they have significant risk factors, but if you have a heel test that shows your bone density is below normal, this can be the stimulus for obtaining a DXA scan. Some practitioners recommend screening women with heel ultrasounds, but by and large the heel test is not yet considered an accurate test to replace DXA scans for either early detection or monitoring. |
Bill Sardi
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| Would you pay for repairs that don't work? insurance companies keep paying for these ineffective treatments because patients keep demanding them. Withhold treatment and patients will be interviewed by news reporters, who will demand to know why patients were denied treatment.
Cancer care in the news
Most of the positive news stories surrounding new cancer drugs today are intended to impress investors in drug stocks, not to deliver promising news to patients. |
| Frequently, cancer patients become pawns of pharmaceutical interests, who want to force insurance companies to pay for unproven treatment. Such was the case in Scotland where health writer Richard Gray wrote the following report:
O r
RICHARD GRAY HEALTH CORRESPONDENT The Scotsman Nov 13, 2005
SCOTTISH cancer patients are being denied access to at least seven potentially life-saving new drugs on cost grounds and as a result of health service bureaucracy. |
| In effect, screening is simply a scouting mission to find more disease to treat and bill insurance companies for, not prevent cancer from occurring in the first place. Cancer screening assumes treatment is effective. It is not.
1 /\. Contrary to what you may read elsewhere, while a good diet is desired, the best diet (5 servings of fruits and vegetables) has utterly failed to prevent cancer. The National Cancer Institute's 5-A-Day Program has been abandoned in favor of 9 tol 3 servings of fruits and vegetables, which is still an unproven approach to reduce cancer mortality. |
| A 95% failure rate is enough for insurance companies to stop paying for the test. Home testing has been shown to be more accurate. [Annals Internal Medicine 142: 81-5, 2005]
It is easy to see that the current scheme of colon/rectal cancer screening is designed to find more disease to treat rather than true prevention.
Surgery
Surgery is the standard treatment for colon cancer. A section of the large intestine is surgically removed and the remaining segments are reattached.
In a study of 290 patients who underwent surgery for colon cancer, 53% experienced polyp recurrences within two years. |
Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea
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| Chiropractics, on the other hand, is still outside standard practice— even though many insurance companies reimburse its services. We debated acupuncture. It is offered at our local hospital's "Center for Integrative Medicine." Yet it still seemed to us sufficiently outside MD medicine that it would not disappear.
The whole issue of alternative medicine—what its boundaries are and who are its practitioners—is vexing, and problematic for our thought experiment. We talked about an illustrative story. |
Too Profitable to CureBrent Hoadley, Ph.D.
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| With results to validate their requirements, government and insurance companies might then be able to deny medical coverage to any diabetic whose monthly monitoring data does not measure up to industry standards of tight control.
What such a study fails to take into account, though, is the very individualistic nature of tight control. An article listed on 1 cites such recognition by R.M. Cohen, M.D., a Professor of Endocrinology at the University of Cincinnati. |
Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D.
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 Although standard medical texts (and insurance companies) do not endorse using PSA as a screen for prostate cancer, it is well known that patients with prostate cancer often have elevated levels of PSA. So when the pilot's PSA rose from normal levels of 1.1 and 1.6 in prior years to 3.9, he became concerned. His doctor told him not to worry since the levels still were within normal limits, but the pilot said he wanted his prostate gland biopsied. This was done, and a tiny area of malignancy was found. |
| This leads to real problems because the neuropsychologist has ways to measure mental effort objectively and because the insurance companies reject disability claims for any patients who make less than a full effort on the tests.
Individuals considering testing need to be aware of two issues: it is extensive and expensive. The neuropsychologist has to test across all cognitive functions and cannot limit the assessment just to evaluating attention and concentration. |
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