CNN On How To Battle Your Insurance Company - But Why?

CNN is running an interesting piece about Bailey Robinson, a child with the same disease as the little boy in Lorenzo's Oil and how his family ran up $200,000 in medical bills trying to treat him all the while having their insurance company respond with denial after denial afer denial.

CNN posted several tips on how to fight your insurance company in such circumstances - getting help from your doctor's office and/or your employer's benefits office; appealing over and over and over again; using the right words as if you've been doing medical coding for a living for the last 20 years; asking your doctor to refile the paperwork slightly differently; and suing the bastards.

My question - and I believe the question that Michael Moore was ultimately asking in Sicko - is WHY do we put sick people and families with sick children through all this? WHY should it be a toe-to-toe slugging match to get desperately needed care? How have we allowed ourselves to be so callous to treat people so badly just because they happen to have conditions that might make someone's bottom line look bad?

When you're sick, when a member of your family is sick, you should be able to concentrate on one thing and one thing only - getting better. You shouldn't have to worry about how you're going to drag your mangled body and/or mind into the cubicle every day just so you can keep your increasingly worthless insurance. And you certainly shouldn't have to think about having to make phone call after phone call and writing letter after letter to try to get paid for coverage that you thought you were going to get when you settled for that mind-numbing job with "good benefits" when you could have been off starting a business or doing something else of some IMPORT ...