Without Insurance, Man's Defibrillator Battery Ran Out -- Now His Sister Wants Everyone To Know

Maybe the insurance company should pay because he likely paid them much more than $10K over the decades he'd been working for a company that carried insurance. I'm unemployed and even with the ARRA reduction of 2/3 of my COBRA payments for 9 months, I'll still have paid $8800 this year to my insurance company.

Maybe they should pay because if the battery isn't user-replaceable, then the user can't be expected to bear the full repsonsibility of maintenance for it. Even @!$%#ing iPod owners have got the courts to assert their right to have their sealed battery replaced at a highly discounted rate.

Or maybe they shouldn't pay voluntarily, but we should force them to pay by passing laws which require humane behavior from insurance companies just like we do from hospitals. An emergency room can't turn away a sick person whom they have never had any business with for inability to pay. Why should an insurance be allowed to turn away a dying former customer?

Or maybe we should expose them to the law of the jungle which they are so quick to enforce. Perhaps we should take away all the subsidies the insurance companies get from all levels of government in the nature of tax breaks, strict licensing to keep out new players with new ideas, exemption from anti-trust statutes, etc.

Or maybe we should convince these companies that unless they become good members of society, we will use the one penalty which we seem reluctant to use on corporations, but which we use easily on people: the death penalty. John Allen Muhammad was put to death last week for killing and/or wounding more than a dozen people in and around Washington DC in Fall 2002. But he was an amateur compared to the insurance industry who have the blood of 40,000 Americans on their hands every year. Perhaps the corporations should be subject to the death penalty for each person who dies because of lack of ability to get insurance.

It sickens me that greed and selfishness have become accepted as a political and economic philosophy. It is revolting that "I shouldn't have to do anything which doesn't make me money" is seen as a reasonable statement of one's rights. And it is horrifying that this kind of reasoning comes from inanimate corporations. But it is downright evil to hear this evidence of a dead, uncaring soul coming from the mouth of a human being who is probably no more than a few missed paychecks away from facing the same situation himself.