An insurance company is a private entity that is just as responsive to negotiation, regulation, and lawsuit as you are. If it wrongfully denies a claim, you have a number of useful methods to get it to cough up: appeals, state Insurance Commissioner, and if all else fails a lawsuit.
Most states have severe penalties for insurers that wrongfully deny claims. It can amount to a quarter of the denied benefits, plus your attorney fees. And insurance commissioners have the power to deny a company permission to write in your state, if the violation is egregious enough.
Often it is only necessary to breathe the words "insurance commissioner" or "bad faith penalties" to get a response.
In contrast, you can't sue the federal government except in very limited circumstances, and I will bet you dollars to donuts that some sort of immunity from suit for the Death Panels and the gummint is hidden somewhere in that two thousand pages of ObamaCare.
But there are plenty of people (mostly liberals/radicals but also just lazy) who would rather use the government to force payment for everything, than exercise personal responsibility to read their insurance policies, negotiate a better deal, or pay for something themselves.
The problem of course is that the "payment for everything" is a completely illusory government promise which the government cannot possibly keep. Hence the death panels.
I agree.
It’s pretty obvious that the death panels are the (unspoken) answer to the impending financial implosion of Social Security and Medicare.