Very few have heard of Robin Beaton. This is the problem with the debate over health care reform.
Beaton, who is retired nurse living in Waxahachie, Texas, thought she had health insurance. Every month she faithfully paid her premiums, but she was dumped by Blue Cross, her health insurance company, when she was diagnosed with aggressive breast cancer.
According to Blue Cross, the fact that she had seen a dermatologist for acne, allowed the company to drop her coverage because of a dermatologist who mistakenly entered a notation on her chart that suggested her simple acne was a precancerous condition.
This was a part of Beaton’s testimony this week before a House subcommittee. She was accompanied by others who thought they had insurance but lost their coverage. Karen Tumulty of Time magazine reports other witnesses such as Peggy Raddatz, whose brother lost his insurance coverage just before he was supposed to receive an expensive stem-cell transplant in treatment of his lymphoma. This was because Fortis Insurance Company discovered that his doctor had on a previous CT scan found gall stones and an aneurysm that never bothered him and that he wasn't even aware of -- conditions that had nothing to do with his cancer. And then there was Jennifer Wittney Horton of Los Angeles, California, who lost her coverage because she had been taking a drug for her irregular menstruation. Now she is unable to get coverage anywhere else. She told the subcommittee that this meant that had had to take jobs that she didn't want, and to put her career goals on hold to ensure that she could find health insurance.
Democrat Bart Stupak of Michigan, the subcommittee's chairman, called the hearing so as to highlight the detestably unethical practice called rescission. His researchers produced performance reviews by insurance company bureaucrats in which they were praised and rewarded for denying people their coverage.
Stupak asked three health insurance executives whether or not their company would pledge to end the practice of rescission except in cases of intentional fraud?
The response of all three health insurance executives was no.
The congressional testimony was quite dramatic. Yet the media avoided it. The only exception was a story run on CNN.com. The New York Times avoided it as did the Washington Post, which found space for a story on the cancellation of Fourth of July fireworks in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, but nothing on the cancellation of health insurance for deathly ill Americans who've paid their premiums.
Congressman Stupak, and the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, D-California, had done their job. Why hadn't the media? Why were the outrages exposed by Stupak and Waxman not touched on by the media?
Possibly because President Obama’s White House had drawn attention away from health care. Obama's proposed reforms of the financial regulatory system had drawn the media coverage.