What in fucking hell is this? An insurance exists to protect people from going bankrupt due to health issues, not to screw people over when they're already in no position to fight.
How on earth is this legal?
No insurance is open-ended, sky-is-the-limit. In many cases (e.g. auto, home, business) the limit is capped at the value of the assets that are insured. In other cases (liability) there is a defined dollar limit. My homeowners and auto policies have liability insurance but there is a limit. If I caused a traffic accident with signifcant property damage and multiple serious injuries, my liability insurance limit would likely be exceeded.
Health insurance has limits as well, even with the recent changes that the ACA introduced. The ACA removes limits on "essential health benefits" but who decides what those are? Hint: Not you.
If there were no limits on health insurance there would be little backpressure to ensure that care provided is worth paying for, or to put it another way, has real benefit. You'd have hopeless cases on life support forever, or unrealistically expensive treatment of conditions for which there is no real hope.
Sad as it is, some health problems can't be fixed, and at some point you need to admit that and stop throwing money away. One more chemo treatment would very likely have made little difference in the outcome for this woman.
Internet forum punditry in a nutshell. This is a ridiculous thing to assert with the amount of information available.
Due to the dangers of chemotherapy, the number of treatments is already carefully balanced against the response to the treatments and our best statistical models. The last treatment can certainly be the difference between remission and recurrence; that's why we give it.
Also, it wouldn't be insurance.
People think that insurance is "something that I want that does nice things for me". It's not.
Insurance is a math problem and it has a precise answer. If you go beyond that answer it doesn't work. Either you're getting screwed or the (hapless) insurance company goes out of business.
This happens today, the only difference is that it's paid for indirectly and inefficiently by everyone's taxes, rather than directly by insurance.
But you can't actually do anything about it, because that would mean "death panels" and lost elections.
Note that no insurance's unwillingness to pay results in the death of a person. This seems like a very US centric way to think.
And yet the US has a severe problem with over-diagnosis and over-treatment of a wide range of stuff, causing a lot of harm to many people. This overtreatment has driven up costs; it's one of the reasons medical costs in the US are so high.
Insurance companies deny coverage for things all the time, for example there is currently a drug cocktail that costs 84k usd with a very high success rate in curing hepatitis c[1]. If you happened to be diagnosed with it tomorrow you would not get this drug, you would have to try the much less expensive (and much less effective) alternatives because your insurance would simply decline to cover the effective drug. I don't see how the lack of a maximum coverage limit would change that.
[1]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-now-have-the-cu...
I'm not sure if you're commenting on their observed behavior or their actual obligation. It would be good to put the phrase away since it's usually short-hand for a moral judgement on short-term focus (be sure, I'm not arguing either way here though I do hold an opinion). The fact is there is no legal duty for a corporation to maximize shareholder value, a couple of links:
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2012/06/26/the-shareholder-v...
Attempting to get the ACA repealed by posting lower than average profits (while running less efficiently, not taking all the tax breaks available, and increasing executive compensation and perks) would certainly maximize shareholder value long term.
I know there's the NICE guidance, and then what a CCG will pay for, and what the cancer drugs fund will pay for. But those decisions almost always are about cost-effective, and not just cost.
One of the reasons other countries spend less on healthcare, compared to the US, is that they just don't pay for certain things (drugs, procedures, etc). The US is a bit more lax when it comes to this and that results in higher costs.
You might as well ask why low end processed cheese ($4.50/lb, not very tasty) is legal - why not ban it and force everyone to eat delicious artisinal asiago ($12.99/lb, mouth wateringly good) instead? Won't someone think of the poor people who aren't spending enough on dinner?
> An insurance exists to protect people from going bankrupt due to health issues
On paper, in reality it is to feed the mouths of health care insurance workers.
The level of rhetoric regarding how nationalized healtcare takes away our choice and freedom and how it brings socialism and doom to our country has always baffled me. I watched the whole thing unfold for many years now. And it wasn't just one or two people here and there, it is whole segments of population who opposed a single payer system, the industry opposed it, so that was thrown out early on.
You'd imagine we were talking about forcing people to sell their first born children or even worse confiscating their property. There were suggestions (even here on HN) of proposing some alternative back to the 1800's free market utopian version ("let's go back to the pure and glorious golden age of free markets" etc). And that would be have been interesting to see and discus if we talked about some experimental new economic system or social order. But we were talking about a basic thing that exists and existed for decades in dozens of other developed countries, which have longer living, healthier, happier people.
Workers? I doubt that. More like executives.
I was 100% under the impression it was taken off the market years ago and replaced with corn starch.
Reading this article is the first time I realized it was not taken off the market, and I'm very confused.
How can I know this is dangerous and the company that makes it not know? I thought it was common knowledge.
I'm having a hard time expressing how perplexed and confused I am to hear talc is still on the market.
I mean, it says "not to inhale it" - how can you possibly apply it and not inhale some of it? It's impossible. There is no way to use this safely without a gas mask.
Limit is 2mg/m3 for 8h days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talc#Industrial_grade
It's possible to use water safely, it's not possible to use talc safely without PPE.
> “People were using something they thought was perfectly safe,” he says. “And it isn’t. At least give people the choice. J&J didn’t give people a choice.” Among the most painful revelations, he says, was that in the 1990s, even as the company acknowledged concerns in the health community, it considered increasing its marketing efforts to black and Hispanic women, who were already buying the product in high numbers.
Cynical question: Was increasing marketing efforts to black and Hispanic women out of racism or a cold risk calculation in the hope that these women couldn't afford to defend themselves as good as other groups? Will J&J be persecuted for this discrimination?
Disclaimer: I am not from US, but by reading HN I am often surprised how things work in US.
I'm sure it could have been as simple as "hey, white women aren't buying as much anymore so we should market to nonwhite women". But when you consider the overall situation it's hard to feel "relief" that some evil racist henchman wasn't behind it. The purity of your heart doesn't matter if this is the outcome.
Corporations of that size aren't usually coordinated that well, in my experience. Most likely, they were just putting marketing money in the demographics they identified in some surveys, and marketing manager responsible for that decision was from completely different department from PR guys handling the health issue.
The lead industry even sought to place the blame for lead poisoning epidemic on parents and children, claiming that the problem was not with the lead paint but with the "uneducable Negro and Puerto Rican" parents who "failed" to stop children from placing their fingers and toys in their mouths. Children poisoned by lead, the industry claimed, had a disease that led them to suck on "unnatural objects" and thereby get poisoned.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/why-it-too...
The cover up orchestrated by Johnson&Johnson here, however, is the deplorable story.
Sounds like pesudo-statistical lawyering. This woman has cancer and she used talc every day of her life, ergo the talc is to blame.
Be it cigarette smoke or a fireplace or smog or perhaps talcum power use = mico particle inhalation.
If there's a real story here this is where it might be, or give me a better written article that is about scientists not juries.
