Death By Hmo : The Jennifer Gigliello Story

Do Health Maintenance Organisations deliberately neglect, or even kill off, their unprofitable patients? You may well think so when you read this book. There is a new world of medicine in the United States. It pulsates to the impersonal and incessantly driving rhythms of profit. Patients are not important in this world. They are little more than data entries in elaborate schemes to cut costs and bolster profits as much as possible. Jennifer Gigliello's case was all too typical. Instead of a caring and competent health care system, what the Gigliello family found in the largest American HMO was, among other discrepancies: A staff totally untrained to deliver the type of care that was required; A system unwilling to consult a specialist to determine the true cause of her excruciating pain; A system which was tactless, cruel, heartless and mean in the extreme; A system whose maximum financial liability in case of the death of a patient -- 250,000 -- was far less than the cost of caring for the patient, thus making it cheaper to let Jenny die than to continue to treat her. This book explores Jennifer Gigliello's medical tragedy and the family's impassioned search to find meaning in the totally needless death of their daughter at the hands of America's largest HMO.