Many are forced to refinance homes, exhaust life savings, deplete retirement accounts, and cash their life insurance policies to pay for the best available medications. Patients under HMO programs are restricted in their choice of doctors and clinics and that may put them at a disadvantage when it comes to receiving the most advanced and promising drugs. HMO doctors practice medicine under strict guidelines and policy limitations that invariably discourage or preclude extensive procedures, costly new and experimental drugs. Patients who do not subscribe to HMO insurance coverage but have insurance that allows them to choose their own doctor and clinic are not immune from large medical bills. Along with the right to choose comes the responsibility to pay for the difference between what the insurance company pays and what the doctor charges.
Patients facing long term or life threatening disease face substantial medical costs also.
There are several questions that merit consideration. The answers are not easy and the legal, moral, and ethical issues are complex, but the battles against restrictive insurance policies, legislative inaction, and court redress will continue. Society has a duty and responsibility to provide the best available medical care and treatment to try and save a human life. To do any less is to declare a death sentence in the name of cost effective treatment, corporate greed, budget balancing, or some other dollar associated reason. And that is morally and ethically corrupt, bankrupt, and wrong.