As a rule, it’s not a good idea to pick up a gun, take over the emergency room of a hospital and threaten to kill your family’s cardiac surgeon. But that’s what Denzel Washington’s character does in the film John Q. when his son is denied the heart transplant he needs to survive. And if box-office reaction is any indication, plenty of frustrated health-care consumers have at least fantasized about doing the same thing: John Q., released in late February, hit No. 1 in its first week and stayed near the top. But does HMO hell really get this bad? The good news is that most of us will never find ourselves in quite the medical crisis the John Q. family does. In the movie, which was written in 1993, during the Clinton health-care-reform battle, the parents are told that a heart transplant costs $250,000, that their insurance doesn’t cover it and that they’re required to post a $75,000 deposit or their sick son will be sent packing. While it’s true that hospitals expect to be reimbursed for services provided to even the neediest and most grievously ill patients, it’s not true that they handle things in so mercenary a manner. “That’s Hollywood,” says Anne Paschke, spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing. “The fact is, there are a lot of things that would prevent that from happening in the real world.” First of all, with 2,200 heart transplants performed in the U.S. each year, the procedure is no longer considered experimental; most policies today cover it. More important, those patients whose policies place restrictions on their transplant coverage and those who have no insurance at all are not simply turned away.
