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Insurance Companies as
Medical Gate Keepers
New medical technologies
need approval from hundreds of private insurance companies, as well as the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration, before they are widely available.
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What is the role of private
health insurance in bringing medical advances into common use? How do private
insurance companies influence what inventions become available to the public
and which ones never get out of the lab?
The Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS) I recently read an article by Nancy Shepherdson about CEO Skip Cummins, who leads a company called Cyberonics. Mr. Cummins is apparently an aggressive entrepreneur who shepherded a new medical device through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval process. The Vagus Nerve Stimulator (VNS) was developed to help regulate nerve impulses responsible for triggering grand mal siezures. It's not my intention here to endorse Cyberonics, Cummins, or the VNS, but rather to illustrate what it takes to bring an new medical technology onto the market. The VNS is implanted in patients who suffer from epilepsy and other seizure disorders. It has apparently worked well for severe epilepsy, earning Cyberonics an award from the Epilepsy Foundation.
Appproval from private insurance
companies took five years. Cummins needed about two years to persuade the FDA to license the VNS for epilepsy treatment. However, FDA approval was not enough to take the VNS to market. As Nancy Shepherson explains in her article, Skip Cummins needed another five years to get approval from so many insurance companies. Subsequent tests have shown the VNS holds promise for treating severe depression. The FDA has approved, but Cyberonics is back trying to convince the private insurance companies. The point here is that until it could be demonstrated to the insurance companies that the VNS could fit into their business models, i.e., that they could profit from it, the VNS would never have come into use by the vast majority of Americans who have private medical insurance.
Time for Universal Medicare? Is this the way we want to run health care? What other promising treatments are being held up by the private insurance bureaucracy? Isn't it time to have a serious national dialog about a single-payer system? Millions of Americans already have federally-funded health care through Medicare or the Veterans Administration. Universal Medicare could save billions of dollars annually in reduced administrative costs, alone. Over 12,000 physicians and health care providers have signed a petition
endorsing single-payer universal health coverage. For more information,
follow the link, below. Physicians for a National Health Program
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Keywords: Insurance bureaucracy, private health insurance, single payer health plan, reform, vagus nerve stimulator
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