Today's Wall Street Journal has a page A1 article (and accompanying blog post) about John Edward's decision to invoke the Nataline Sarkisyan case in his campaign-trail discussions of health care. Sarkisyan, you may remember, was the 17-year-old California girl who died a few weeks ago, shortly after her family's insurance company turned down her doctors' request that they cover a liver transplant for her. The tone of the article is somewhat negative toward Edwards' decision, and not all of their criticism is entirely unfair.
Edwards, they claim, "has been bashing big health insurers in recent days with the [Sarkisyan] story ... but ... may be oversimplifying the tale." In truth, the Journal is almost certainly right. Sarkisyan's case was very complex. The transplant was very risky. According to her doctors, the transplant would give her a 65% chance of surviving for another six months, and even if the transplant was a complete success, there would still be the problem of the underlying leukemia to deal with. It's entirely possible (if not probable) that the chief medical officer for the insurer is correct when he says that, "It is highly unlikely that any health-care insurance system, nationally or internationally, would have covered this procedure."
Despite all that, Edwards is absolutely right to put this case front and center in the debate over health care policy in this coverage. There may be a great deal of room for debate over the details, but the undisputed facts of the case illustrate both some of the key problems with our health care system and the complete and utter fallacy of one of the primary sound bites used by the politicians who oppose any significant health care reform.
