Better Care for Cats
by Tony Chavira
This is Oscar, and he is a cat. When he was 2 and ah half years old, Oscar had a horrific farming accident that left him without his legs:
His owners, Kate and Mike Nolan, took him to their local veterinarian. In turn, the vet referred Oscar to Dr. Noel Fitzpatrick, a neuro-orthopedic surgeon in Eashing, 35 miles southwest of London.
Together with biomedical engineering experts, Fitzpatrick gave Oscar two metal prosthetic implants that are a bit wobbly, to imitate a cat's natural walk. But first, he covered the brown implants with black tape to match Oscar's fur.
Poor Oscar, but the prostetics have been designed to be as realistic to the way he moves as possible. Oscar himself paid nothing for the operation, but the legs were about $3,000 for the pair and that doesn't include the cost of the operation. Had Oscar's owners not had that money, he would certainly have to scrape his kitty-self all over the house from that point forward.
$3,000 and less expensive operation expenses seems cheap compared to the high tens of thousands people are paying to use hospitals in the United States right now. And things don't seem to be getting any cheaper... a Massachussetts insurance board yesterday sided with health care insurers who recently hiked their rates for small businesses, saying that the expenses to provide healthcare validated the rate hike. All this after Massachussetts governor Deval Patrick swore to try to keep any rate hikes from happening.
I'm not going to go into a rant about how this makes it harder for the small business owner to provide insurance, and makes it harder (in turn) to cover their costs. That's obvious. What I am going to say though is that Oscar the cat received better care for less money than if a person had had the same accident in any state and needed proestetic legs. Oscar's owners got a better deal and a shorter span of waiting time before Oscar's operation than most people who need similar operations these days.
This is an especially big slap on the face for our President, who only the other week released a "Patients Bill of Rights." In it's a section called "Reviewing Insurers’ Premium Increases," and here's what it says verbatim:
HHS [Health and Human Services] recently offered States $51 million in grant funding to strengthen review of insurance premiums. Annual premium hikes can put insurance out of reach of many working families and small employers. These grants are a down-payment that enable States to act now on reviewing, disclosing, and preventing unreasonable rate hikes. Already, a number of States, including California, New York, Maine, Pennsylvania and others are moving forward to improve their oversight and require more transparency of insurance companies’ requests to raise rates.
The question is, what happens when your state Insurance Review Board actually allows a rate increase either without thorough investigation, due to corruption, or because of some sort of threshold requirement? Just as importantly, how much of a rate hike is too much for the average small business owner or family to bear? What is it going to take, really, to make health insurance more affordable?
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