As degenerative disc disease rapidly eroded a lifestyle that once included climbing the Matterhorn, dangling from bungee cords and jumping from airplanes, Bryant Veazey ran headlong into a health care conundrum.
His neurosurgeon wanted to replace the deteriorating disc with an artificial disc used for years in Europe and recently approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
But his health insurer won’t pay for it and wants him to have more conventional – and less expensive – spinal fusion surgery.
“I think the huge deal here is the rules are made by people who can control lobbyists and people in Washington,” says Veazey, a 32-year-old financial manager from Westminster. “I pay and my company pays to have me insured, then when something happens that they don’t feel comfortable with, they turn me down.”
Veazey’s distrust of insurance company motives sounds a familiar note in the debate over health care in America – and raises the sort of big- picture questions planners of the $5.6 million Fulginiti Pavilion for Ethics and Humanities hope to address on the Fitzsimons campus of the University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center.
Mark Yarborough, director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, says the 10,000- square-foot pavilion on which builders break ground today will provide a space for people to hammer out agreements on a variety of community concerns.
He envisions dynamic discussion about everything from reproductive technology to end-of-life issues and as varied as cochlear implants and communities underserved by health care.
“That building will provide the infrastructure to do ethics, like laboratories provide infrastructure to do scientific research,” Yarborough says. “Except the laboratories get a half-million more square feet.”
In addition to providing a home for the university’s bioethics program, the pavilion is what backers call the first such building in the country dedicated to addressing ethical concerns – and what Yarborough calls “trust issues.”
Those issues include such matters as how limited health care resources are distributed, the relationship between drugmakers and doctors and whether minorities are treated differently. Such questions can place segments of a community at odds.
“How do we reverse that dynamic?” Yarborough says. “We want to change the inertia of groups. And the only way to make that happen is to get people to literally sit around the table.”
The privately funded building at the expanding health sciences site in Aurora will house 10 faculty offices, several small meeting rooms, a gallery and a tiered amphitheater designed to promote effective discussion among many parties.
The pavilion is scheduled to open in the summer of 2007, though it remains about $1.5 million short of its fundraising goal.
Peg O’Keefe, chairwoman of the center’s advisory board who works in health care communications in the nonprofit sector, sees diverse groups gathering in the forum – at little or no cost – to hash out important topics such as emergency disaster plans.
“It’s an opportunity for policy development, but also for building collaboration and agreement among a wide variety of people and organizations in the community,” she says. “It’s an incredible partnership that gives us something richer than the university could do on its own.”
Yarborough has put his faith in a “build it and they will come” philosophy behind the pavilion, where communities, business interests and health care professionals will bat around bioethical concerns stemming from experiences like Veazey’s.
“That’s a perfect example of the kinds of issues we need to be having more broad-based discussions about,” says Yarborough. “It gets to the heart of arguably the key ethical issue in health care today: how to determine the use of resources, and who should be involved.”
Staff writer Kevin Simpson can be reached at 303-820-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com.
