You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Aetna Ordered to Pay Family of Cancer Patient Denied Treatment

HeadlineNov 12, 2018

And in Oklahoma City, a jury has ordered the insurance giant Aetna to pay over $25 million to the family of a cancer patient who died after she was denied cancer treatment. The jury ruled Aetna acted recklessly in 2014 when three of the company’s medical directors decided to deny radiation therapy to Orrana Cunningham, who had stage IV cancer near her brain stem. The directors called the treatment “experimental,” even though it’s covered under Medicare. Orrana died in 2015 at the age of 54; doctors think the treatment denied by Aetna might have dramatically extended her life.

Topics:
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top