Damaged
Care, directed by Harry Winer, is a docudrama
about the unsavory health maintenance organization (HMO)
industry,
which began through Congressional legislation in 1973.
One day, Dr. Linda Peeno (played by Laura Dern) is hired
by profitmaking Humana Health Care in Louisville, Kentucky,
to approve requests from physicians for extraordinary expenditures
on behalf of patients. One of her earliest cases involves
a man on an operating table who is in need of a heart transplant,
which would cost some $500,000 to Humana. Pressure brought
to bear on her by her nonmedical superiors results in a
denial of the request, even though she knows that the patient
will die. As she leaves Humana's office, she walks past
a sculpture that costs nearly $500,000, sad that she has
caused a death just to keep her job. But not for long.
She resigns and joins a nonprofit HMO, hoping for a better
situation. But cost containment procedures are soon imposed,
and she again resigns. The film also features a case involving
Kaiser Permanente in which a baby with a 104° temperature
is routed to an emergency room at a distant hospital, just
to save 15 percent in costs, and the result of delayed
care is quadriplegic amputation. Accordingly, Dr. Peeno
begins to speak out, at first in public lectures, later
on a television newsmagazine, before the House of Representatives
Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, and finally
in court. To demonstrate her courage, the film shows how
she persists despite receiving little support from her
family, including her philandering husband Doug (played
by James LeGros). In one case, while at Humana, Dr. Peeno
approves a voice machine for a stroke victim, Dawn Dubose
(played by Suki Kaiser) then uses the device to talk by
touching a pencil to a computer keyboard with her teeth;
but when Dr. Peeno leaves Humana, her successor disapproves
payment for the device after ten months. In the resulting
lawsuit, in which she testifies as an expert witness, the
jury awards $8.5 million in punitive damages (though titles
tell us that on appeal the defendant agreed to a smaller
settlement rather than undergoing a second lengthy jury
trial). The film ends with a plea from Dr. Peeno to bring
about a change in the health care system within the United
States, yet only Showtime has the courage to screen the
Paramount film Damaged Care,
albeit without much fanfare, thus perhaps eloquently demonstrating
the power of the
HMO industry to suppress facts about the tragic consequences
of allowing medical decisions to be made by nonphysicians.
In contrast, the plot of John
Q (2002), a feature film
that makes a similar point, is sidetracked by a hero who
takes innocent hostages instead of than focusing on the
HMO scrooges whom Damaged Care portrays
so vividly. MH
I
want to comment on this film
