Health-care critic battles on Doctor featured in film says system can be improved
BY ARZA BARNETT, THE COURIER-JOURNAL
Dr. Linda Peeno, center, talked with Dr. Betty Straub, left, as Sister Mary Rhoads Buckler listened before the showing of the film “Damaged Care.” Peeno and Buckler were portrayed in the film.
In the two years since the release of a movie depicting her battles with the managed health-care industry, Dr. Linda Peeno has heard a lot from the companies involved, she said last night.
What surprised the Louisville physician, though, was hearing from many industry employees who say they know that denying care for financial reasons is wrong.
“I hear this over and over and over again,” Peeno said after a showing of the 2002 movie, “Damaged Care,” at an event at Central High School, 1130 W. Chestnut St.
“I’ve been able to be the voice for a lot of people who haven’t been able to speak up,” Peeno told an audience of about 60 people who identified themselves as doctors, nurses, teachers, labor and religious leaders, and “citizens.”
The event was organized by Kentuckians for Single Payer Healthcare, a group that advocates national health insurance, including a bill before Congress.
The Showtime cable-television movie, which was critical of corporate managed care, starred Laura Dern as Peeno. It tells the story of Peeno’s difficult personal and professional life, including a failed marriage and her battle with Humana Inc.
Peeno, a native of Hodgenville, Ky., has a medical degree from the University of Louisville specializing in internal medicine and infectious diseases. She worked in the 1980s as a medical reviewer for Humana Inc. and as medical director at Blue Cross/Blue Shield Health Plans.
The film shows how she became disillusioned with managed-care systems and eventually left to serve as an expert witness in cases involving insurance companies accused of denying care.
Peeno said that one of the lessons of the movie — and a theme she still advocates — is the need to change the corporate system of health care in the United States.
“We hear constantly that we have to allocate resources,” Peeno said, describing those who want to let the free market solve the nation’s growing health-care crisis. “But there is more than enough money in our health-care system to have quality care.”
She cited what she said were high salaries and profits in the industry. At the time of the movie’s debut, Humana officials said that it was inaccurate and that the company is dedicated to the health and welfare of patients.
Asked what impact she has had on the managed-care system, Peeno paused, then answered, “I like to think that at least part of what I have done was begin to articulate what an ethical health-care system is.”
Peeno has traveled widely around the country in recent years on court cases and for other health-care related events, she said.
“One of the effects I’ve seen is of the complete dispiriting — almost a gutting of the spirit — of health-care professionals, from doctors all the way down,” she said.
Peeno said she didn’t necessarily blame the workers in the managed-care system.
“We’re not talking about evil people, bad people,” she said. “At the basis of it, it’s the way we’re organizing the system.”
Asked about whether managed-care corporations had changed since the years depicted in the movie, Peeno said she had once thought they would “magically straighten up” after a few years of public exposure of their flaws, through lawsuits and other public actions.
But that hasn’t happened, she said.
Instead, industry representatives have argued that practices like those in the movie were “the old way,” she said.
That achieves the same effect of putting profits before people, “but doing so more subtly” by using “layers of organization” and “various ways of eluding responsibility and accountability,” Peeno said.
Event organizers called for support of the Medicare for All Act, proposed by Rep. John Conyers Jr., D-Mich. The bill would provide for a single-payer national health-care system with universal coverage.
Peeno said she supported the bill but added, “No single piece of legislation is going to solve the larger problem of this system and how we all live together in this society.”