Video: The (Not So) Symbolic Middle Finger From The Insurance Industry

Here’s a nice detail from an LA Times story about Hilda Sarkysian:

Surrounded by supporters, Hilda Sarkisyan marched into Cigna Corp.’s Philadelphia headquarters on a chilly fall day, 10 months after the company refused to pay for a liver transplant for her daughter.

“You guys killed my daughter,” the diminutive San Fernando Valley real estate agent declared at the lobby security desk. “I want an apology.”

What she got was something quite different.

Cigna employees, looking down into the atrium lobby from a balcony above, began heckling her, she said, with one of them giving her “the finger.”

There’s video of this confrontation. Check it around 3:40:

Sadly, this exchange is the only ledge on which the Sarkysians can hang a wrongful death lawsuit on CIGNA. A judge threw out the case on the basis of a 1987 ruling from the Supreme Court as well as ERISA (the Employee Retirement Income Security Act), which bars individuals from holding insurers of employer-paid health care plans responsible for their coverage decisions, but they can claim that the finger incident caused them “emotional distress.” Even Hilda Sarkysian calls this absurd: “They kill a beautiful 17-year-old girl, and I get to go after them for a finger? That’s sick.”

But of course, the insurance industry sticks their proverbial middle finger up at the country every day, with plans that cost more every year for the same coverage, companies that rescind policies when patients want to use them, and byzantine rules that they use to get out of providing care. The only surprise about this gesture is that it’s not one of the health insurer’s corporate logos.

…Five more people were arrested at CIGNA HQ yesterday. I wonder how many of them were flipped the bird.

madddyhumphrey

the police were arresting the wrong group of people -

csheehy

And they worry about the govt rationing health care?? Just what would you call this? (Well, other than murder...) Absurd, obscene, amoral, byzantine, Draconian... words fail me... This sort of thing needs to be made more public, more often, til it sinks in.

ej_or

I think we may need to change a law here.

nancych

Health insurance companies are outdated, bloodsucking parasites on the American people. They have driven costs so high, more and more people are unable to afford their premiums. Innocent people are dying because of corporate greed. Government provided health care is the ONLY answer. Call it what you will, what we have now is NOT working.

William Rogers

How disgusting is this?! I think it speaks VOLUMES about what the health insurance industry htinks about its clients- nothing but CONTEMPT! So I would say F**K to the insurance companies- let's get a public option, and maybe even JUST all one single payer system, and ditch the assholes at Cigna, Aetna, Blue Shield etc- I'm William Rogers RN (Ret.) and I APPROVEd this message!

rewinn

Health insurance companies have no function in health care, except to skim money off transactions between patients and doctors. They are completely amoral; they live by collecting premiums and denying coverage.

While individual human beings are the "good Germans" fulfilling positions within insurance companies, the real problem is the company itself: a legal structure with no morality and no purpose except to suck blood out of patients.

They exist only by operation of law; their existence must be ended by legal means.

linda m

I just want to mention that I think Kaiser, Sutter -Gould in northern California seem to have a strangle hold on folks in the Bay Area and it is a perfect example of control in their areas and not very good care. Check it out, just an observation on my part.

Thanks