Can health plans be compassionate toward persons with spinal cord injury?

Abstract

This article explores the idea of extending "compassion" toward persons with spinal cord injury (SCI) from the perspective of the contemporary insurance marketplace and its familiar reliance on actuarialization and premium pricing practices. Assuming that these economic constructs, or their public sector analogues such as taxes and eligibility criteria, are necessary to achieve adequate reserves for insurers to pay claim costs, this article will present a number of arguments showing that compassion would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to integrate coherently and elaborately into benefits calculations. Nevertheless, because compassion is an attractive ethical notion that many persons would want to embrace or at least not wish to abandon entirely, this article ends by describing a mechanism that might inform the compassionate inclinations of a private insurer. VVe will conclude by proposing the creation of an SCI "compassionate care committee" and discuss various criteria that might ethically guide such a committee's compassionate deliberations. © 2008 Thomas Land Publishers, Inc.