BY KAREN WEBB
I want a level playing field. If pay for the little guy’s lawyers have to be limited then why shouldn’t the pay for the corporate lawyers be limited?
Corporate lawyers make a fortune limiting what I could be compensated with regardless of what has been done by a doctor or a company because I am supposedly being frivolous. I have never sued anyone, but I know people who have.
Why is it that no one in the Legislature appears to be concerned about the pay of the people defending the wealthy against the poor?
I could walk into Wal-Mart today and be put in a coma from a light fixture falling on my head and my lawyer would be limited, but they could pay their lawyer a fortune while he claims it was not negligence because Wal-Mart didn’t force me to come in and I was using witchcraft on the fixture to get money.
An actual story: Back when my daughter was still on her Dad’s HMO we were told we had not met the deductible for her medication in November when she had been taking two medications for the entire year. Of course, it didn’t help that they had changed the system twice in the year regarding whether it would be under her Social Security number or her father’s.
The woman at the HMO informed me that it was my husband who was prescribed the medication and not my daughter and that giving it to her was some sort of fraud. I asked the woman if she knew what one of the medications was for and she said it didn’t matter. So I asked her why her company would approve of a prescription for birth control for a 50-year-old man who had had a vasectomy.
Why wouldn’t they question that?
Just in the last couple of years my husband has been given high-level medications for hepatitis because his insurance is good and now his virus is non-detectable. Had he not had that insurance they would have had to try three lower level medications to see if they worked before trying this one. Each time we would have had to pay deductibles for each trial. The same thing happened when my dad was dying with the same insurance, but the doctor had to fudge on his diagnosis to get the insurance company to OK it. The doctors do not make the judgments – it is the executives who are not concerned with health, but with profits.
Might I suggest that to help drug companies with their profits, they should stop telling me what to tell my doctor to prescribe in the way of medications. Advertising prescription drugs on TV is a waste of money. They should stop it and reduce the amount we have to pay. Telling me to tell my doctor what I need and then rattling of 40 different side affects to save their own butts is rather distasteful.
– Karen Webb lives in Moore, OK and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
