Letter: Managed care should focus on treatment, not profits

Last month, I attended the funeral of a 14-year-old girl who died when her HMO refused to do an inexpensive blood test that would have shown that what she had was a perforated pancreas and not the flu. The pain of her family was real, not "anecdotal," like these insurance companies like to say.

Eli Siegel, the great philosopher and founder of aesthetic realism, was right when he showed that health care based on profits is unethical because it is "based on contempt for people."

Health care, something so needed for the very lives of people, should be based on ethics. And the main question in ethics, Siegel showed, is: "What does a person deserve by being a person?" I'm grateful that what people deserve matters to me, and that has made me a kinder doctor and person.

Jaime R. Torres, New York

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