Insurance Discrimination the Number of People Who

Insurance Discrimination

The number of people who need a liver transplant is currently far greater than the number of donor livers available. Unfortunately, this can lead to discrimination by insurance companies against alcoholics who they believe have caused their own ill health and are, therefore, less deserving of the liver than other individuals. However, medical principles should guide treatment procedures not prejudice. Alcoholics should have the same access to health care as anyone else.

The discrimination against alcoholics occurs because insurance companies fail to recognize the disease nature of addiction. According to the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence and the American Society of Addiction Medicine, "Alcoholism is a primary, chronic disease with genetic, psychosocial, and environmental factors influencing its development and manifestations."

This definition recognizes alcoholism as a disease, i.e., as an involuntary disability and accepts a genetic vulnerability in some people. Thus, to discriminate against alcoholics because of the belief that they have some sort of moral defect defies medically accepted evidence that suggests otherwise. Ignorance always seems to the largest driver of prejudice.

Insurance companies also mistakenly believe that alcoholics will be less likely to benefit from a liver transplant than other patients. However, researchers have proved that discrimination against alcoholics in liver transplant programs is unjustified. They have found no major differences in survival or organ rejection rates between liver transplants of cirrhosis patients and those with other liver diseases. Thus, liver transplantation is just as justified for alcoholic cirrhosis as it is for other factors leading to liver damage.

The denial of a liver transplant to an alcoholic represents an undesired shift from humanitarian ethics to utilitarian ethics. Humanitarian ethics state that the well being of the individual is central. Today, insurance companies are asking doctors and patients to accept a new utilitarian ethic where the well being of others prevails over the well being of the patient. The doctor judges the quality and the sense of whether a patient is a burden or useful to society, etc. In the past, medical ethics had been based on the notion that all men's lives had equal value. But now, utilitarianism maintains that this can no longer be maintained as available resources can't keep up with demand.