I just love it when legislators tell insurance companies whose services they should insure. Lawmakers are obviously so much more qualified to judge the efficacy of different medical treatments — why shouldn’t we trust their judgment?
Pardon my snark. A bill has passed the House of Delegates and moved to the state Senate that would forbid insurance companies from holding proton therapy to a higher standard of clinical evidence than other radiation treatments.
Del. David Yancey, R-Newport News, submitted the bill on behalf of Hampton University (HU), which just happens to have a Proton Therapy Institute. HU complains that the procedure is still treated as experimental despite decades of research, explains Travis Fain with the Daily Press.
To tug at legislators’ heart strings, the bill’s supporters brought in Carolyn Lambert, wife of Benjamin Lambert, who served in the Senate more than 20 years and died in 2014. The Lamberts’ son is fighting prostate cancer now. Speaking in a halting voice, she said, the insurers “have abandoned him.”
Insurance lobbyists counter that they use blind studies to make coverage decisions, and that proton therapy makes the cut in some cases, such as pediatric and skull cancers, but not in others. “The bottom line is we don’t evaluate them differently,” said Doug Gray, executive director of the Virginia Association of Health Plans.
The Senate Commerce and Labor Committee passed the bill on what appeared to be a unanimous voice vote, reports Fain. Sen. John Cosgrove, R-Chesapeake, a motioned “as a cancer survivor” to send the bill to the floor.
Bacon’s bottom line: This illustrates the worst of everything about the way the General Assembly works. Anecdotal information and sentimentality demolish reason and empirical evidence. The legislature is well on its way to passing a law that could well nudge the cost of insurance policies higher. The prostate cancer of Sen. Lambert’s son is a tragedy. What we will never see is the tragedy of the “third man,” the invisible victim for whom the cost of medical insurance will be put just out of reach.
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