Remember Nataline Sarkisyan? She was the 17-year-old who died because CIGNA wouldn't pay for her liver transplant. Said it was "experimental." And by the time public outrage forced them to backtrack, she was dead.

Now her parents are trying to change the law that forbids them from suing CIGNA for damages - because until they do, it's cheaper for insurers to let people die:

"It was the worst thing in life," Hilda Sarkisyan said in a recent interview.

Mark Geragos, the high-profile trial lawyer who helped the family make its pleas to Cigna while Nataline was alive, filed the wrongful death suit on the family's behalf last year.

"If you don't sue, you can't make changes," Hilda Sarkisyan said. "It's not about the money. It's about the principle. They are just going to keep denying people care if we don't stop them."

Cigna said the dismissal of the wrongful-death case in April showed that the court "agreed with our position that the Sarkisyans' claims regarding Cigna's decision making were without merit."

In fact, the court did not consider the merits of the family's wrongful-death claims. Instead, it decided those claims could not be heard.

Judge Feess cited rulings by the Supreme Court and others interpreting 1974's Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, which governs employee retirement funds and benefit plans.

Under ERISA, the courts have said, the only monetary damages that beneficiaries of workplace health plans can sue for is the cost of the treatment of service in dispute.

The cost of mounting a lawsuit often far exceeds the cost of the treatment in question, patient lawyer Scott Glovsky said. As a result, few lawyers take them on. That has in effect shut the courthouse doors on most treatment coverage disputes involving workplace health plans, which are the source of medical insurance for 132 million workers and dependents.

"ERISA is a license to kill," Glovsky said. "The companies know that they can deny treatment with the sick or dead member having virtually no recourse."

Wendell Potter, a Cigna spokesman who quit after handling the publicity surrounding the Sarkisyan case, agreed.

"HMOs and insurers are largely free to deny access to care without fear of reprisal or financial consequences," Potter said in a speech to the Civil Justice Foundation in San Francisco.

But, without these limits, an industry spokesman said suits against health insurers could be disastrous for consumers.

"It will bankrupt these plans, and employers would no longer be able to offer coverage," said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.

Then maybe you should go ahead and pay for the procedures instead. It would be good for your image and you could save a lot of money!

With Congress considering a healthcare overhaul -- including a requirement that individuals buy health insurance -- Potter, the Sarkisyans and their supporters want lawmakers to undo the high court's 1987 ERISA ruling.

Santa Monica-based Consumer Watchdog sent a letter to key congressional leaders urging them to undo the ERISA ruling, and president Jamie Court said Nataline's case shows why such a move is crucial to any healthcare reform.

"If the insurer decides they don't want to pay for the treatment because they can save a lot of money, there is not a dime available in damages if the person dies or is injured," Court said. "It's cheaper to kill you. If you die, you can't go to court."

It's not the first time this aspect of ERISA has come under fire.

In 2001, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy led an unsuccessful effort to take away the protection for health insurers.

"Patients should have the right to hold their HMO accountable in court when its negligence causes the injury or death of a patient," Kennedy told Senate colleagues.

You can't really talk about serious health care reform without looking at major changes in the American way of childbirth. The L.A. Times this morning points out that one of the things driving costs ever upward is the U.S. Cesarean rate, a major surgical procedure now performed in almost one-third of hospital births:

Once reserved for cases in which the life of the baby or mother was in danger, the cesarean is now routine. The most common operation in the U.S., it is performed in 31% of births, up from 4.5% in 1965.

With that surge has come an explosion in medical bills, an increase in complications -- and a reconsideration of the cesarean as a sometimes unnecessary risk.

It is a big reason childbirth often is held up in healthcare reform debates as an example of how the intensive and expensive U.S. brand of medicine has failed to deliver better results and may, in fact, be doing more harm than good.

"We're going in the wrong direction," said Dr. Roger A. Rosenblatt, a University of Washington professor of family medicine who has written about what he calls the "perinatal paradox," in which more intervention, such as cesareans, is linked with declining outcomes, such as neonatal intensive care admissions. Maternity care, he said, "is a microcosm of the entire medical enterprise."

As the No. 1 cause of hospital admissions, childbirth is a huge part of the nation's $2.4-trillion annual healthcare expenditure, accounting in hospital charges alone for more than $79 billion.

Because spending on the average uncomplicated cesarean for all patients runs about $4,500, nearly twice as much as a comparable vaginal birth, cesareans account for a disproportionate amount (45%) of delivery costs. (Among privately insured patients, uncomplicated cesareans run about $13,000.)

Pregnancy is the most expensive condition for both private insurers and Medicaid, according to a 2008 report by the Childbirth Connection, a New York think tank.

"The financial toll of maternity care on private [insurers]/employers and Medicaid/taxpayers is especially large," the report said. "Maternity care thus plays a considerable role in escalating healthcare costs, which increasingly threaten the financial stability of families, employers, and federal and state budgets."

Are there other options, other solutions? Yes. Off-site birthing centers and home deliveries have lower C-section rates and healthier outcomes for mothers and babies. For decades, the all-powerful American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has managed to prevent any truly rigorous review of statistics here (preferring to use data that counts miscarriages as home deliveries), but the Netherlands have done it for us.

They found that births where women actually prepared to deliver at home (as opposed to precipitous labors where sudden complications forced them to deliver there) were just as likely to have a safe delivery and healthy baby as those who delivered in a hospital under the care of a midwife.

The group who chose to give birth in hospital rather than at home were more likely to be first-time mothers or of an ethnic minority background - the risk of complications is higher in both these groups.

[...] But Professor Buitendijk said the study did have relevance for other countries like the UK with a highly developed health infrastructure and well-trained midwives.

In the UK, the government has pledged to give all women the option of a home birth by the end of this year. At present just 2.7% of births in England and Wales take place at home, but there are considerable regional variations.

Louise Silverton, deputy general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said, the study was "a major step forward in showing that home is as safe as hospital, for low risk women giving birth when support services are in place.

Here are just some of the things you can avoid in a home delivery: Hospital "supergerms"; birthing positions that actually make fetal distress (and thus, a C-section) more likely; the use of powerful labor-inducing drugs that not only increase the likelihood of a C-section, but also of uterine rupture; and an episiotomy that may be painful for years.

I did it both ways: A hospital birth with a doctor and nurse-midwife, and a home delivery attended by lay midwives. (I told my then-husband I would "never" have another child in a hospital after they almost killed my first-born and then bragged about how they "saved" him.) Not only did I give birth at home with my youngest, I was up cooking breakfast for everyone just a few hours later. It was an experience I wouldn't trade for the world. It was better in every possible way.

For more info on home deliveries, see Rikki Lake's documentary "The Business of Being Born" on YouTube.

In this day and age where it's perfectly normal for bands to take years between albums, it's not a lot of news that Oasis won't have another album for five years, but Noel Gallagher does want you to know that he's putting Oasis on hold for a few years to work on his solo albums and because he thinks that his brother Liam is a jerk.

Noel tells Q Magazine that Liam, known for an angelic voice and a terrible personality, hasn't even met Noel's son. "He's rude, arrogant, intimidating, and lazy. He's the angriest man you'll ever meet. He's like a man with a fork in a world of soup." Looks like Noel has gotten much more clever with words since he wrote "I've got to be myself, I can't be no one else" in Oasis's first song.