How Crafty Health Insurers Are Denying Care

RE: For Profit or Else

You claim that if we "take the profit motive out of healthcare, it eliminates a whole host of evils and people get much better care". What is your basis of evidence here? The fact is, for-profit healthcare institutions have consistently better outcomes and lower costs than non-profits. In addition, we live in a free market economy, and making a profit (or at least breakeven) is necessary to sustain any operation.

Finally, no physician should be under any obligation to see any patient (outside of the ED), regardless of their health insurance. You can call is unpatriotic until the cows come home, but individuals running a business should continue to have every right to refuse service to anyone they want.

Europe Health

The fact that Europe has top quality health care that is government sponsored is THE ENTIRE REASON FOR THE BETTER QUALITY AND LONGER LIFESPANS over there.

NY

You idiot! Europeans have a higher health status than the US because they have better healthcare, they utilize PREVENTIVE measures so they have LESS disease and longer lives. Our healthcare "SYSTEM" is killing us. We spend 16% of GDP on healthcare - TWICE as much as other nations who have a higher health status then the US - we are ranked 37th below even that of developing nations and poor little countries like Cuba. For Europeans healthcare is a RIGHT of ALL citizens - everyone is cared for and their system works. We need to take PROFIT out of healthcare - it's obsene for people and healthcare organizations to make profits from the suffering of others - only in American, some view that as our right to free enterprise.

arm yourself with information

Until it ran out of funding, www.healthinsuranceinfo.net, affiliated with Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, was the single best source of unbiased information regarding a patient’s rights with their private health insurance. As a healthcare advocate with over thirty year’s experience, I recommended their state specific guides to my clients as the first step in resolving their health benefit issues. I hope that they can regain their funding soon.

Amusing

Ohhhh - socialism is eviiiilllll. LOL. Funny people you are. I guess socialism is only for the rich who get to tap the public purse whenever they have problems. The rest of us can go rot.

The only people in the USA who are covered for everything HAVE socialized medicine. And all of them work for the government at some level. The military medical is totally socialized medicine. Congress has utterly socialized and comprehensive medical care. The Civil Service has - you guessed it - totally comprehensive and yes, socialized medical.

Funny how it's "too good" for the commoners. And even funnier that they've managed to convince the commons that there IS no "socialized medicine" in the USA.

And people, get a grip. Medicine is so expensive in the US because of GREED, nothing else. The medical profession is the most limited union in the world bar none. The internships, the late nights the forced slavery to a hospital for three or four years and the immense amounts of stress are INTENDED to keep the numbers down and limited. Fewer doctors means more expensive doctors. This is a fact. Putting extreme stress on the students does NOT make better doctors, it simply causes many of them to drop out and do something else.

As for hospitals, they are run for a profit and that profit is quite high. Go to Edgar and check the prospectus (Form DEF14A) from Hospital Corporation of America. That isn't some kind of nonprofit.

Doctors won't work for fixed salaries - oh my, somebody better go tell Mayo Clinic that one. The clinic does NOT do the commissioned doctor method of hiring.

The high cost of malpractice insurance - that's pretty funny too. The state of Tennessee had a request from the insurers back in 2000 to raise the charges for malpractice insurance. They checked with the state commissioner, he said "few claims, fewer actually paid, average payout less than 100K, charges to doctors 80K per year". So the state asked to see the books to show why they were considering leaving TN as an "unprofitable" state. The insurance companies refused, withdrew their request and went home in a huff, declaiming loudly that the state was courting disaster. They still haven't gotten that increase and no disaster has hit yet. Doctors are being SOAKED, and the company profits need to be REGULATED to a percentage, not just unlimited to infinity.

Drug costs - oh good lord. Come on, when the US exports drugs and then passes laws to prevent seniors from crossing the border to BUY THOSE SAME DRUGS at a 60% reduction in price from the US - something is wrong and it's called GREED! GREED IS NOT GOOD WHEN IT LEADS TO EXCESS! And the medical system in the USA is failing due to those excesses.

Do your research. There are lies, damned lies and even more damned lies, and many of them are being told about medicine in the USA every day. Learn a few facts, then show up on a web forum.

This county's plans, more than one in succession, just issued one bad check and disappeared after a covered child's expensive medical problem.

If you think the insurance companies are bad, and they are rip-off artists, take a good look at the so-called 'self-insured" plans, which are exempt from virtually all of the very limited oversight and regulation to which the insurance companies are even theoretically subject. I read one injured client's plan, advertised to attract employees, and, so help me, it provides that they will pay only whatever the boss decides he wants to pay. It has a required arbitration plan, but the boss is the designated arbitrator. It is completely unfunded and, since your cliam is not yet "liquidated," you have no standing in their Chapter 11 bankruptcy in which they dump any liability they might ever have had. My wife's school district employer had a beefits management company the identity and address of which, if it actually existed except as an answering service that knew nothing and was simply instructed to say "no," the state and I could not learn, which made little difference because the terms of the plan had not even been typed several months into the schol year when the medical emergency arose. Under ERISA, there is, as you note, no meaningful review of any argument the Plan Administrator, beholden to the company, can make. Since employment is "at will," if you cost them money, much less try to get them to honor their promises, or they find out your child has an expensive problem, they just fire you.

I saw defense contract workers who didn't even know they had no policy and one of the big insurers just managed the self-insured plan, which we discovered exempted them from anti-discrimination, unfair claims settlement, dn other such laws entirely apart form the Erisa preemption and Plan Administrator is always right rule.

MSN had an article advising businesses to get their prospective and current employees' allegedly privileged and confidential medical records before hiring them and not to hire anyone with a disability or medical problem.

The Attorney General of Texas, who features his wheelchair, and links to ADA resources, in his political ads and state web page, has taken the position that Title II of the ADA covering state agency employees is unconstitutional.

The employees of my small law office and I couldn't get health insurance for love or money except from some company the state insurance . A "No salesmen" sign didn't help, but all you had to say was "pre-existing conditions" to send them all running like you had set their tails on fire.

I live in a Soviet Socialist Republic about 75 miles northeast of Dallas, Texas, called Hunt County, where the top ten employers are one defense contract plant in that alien economic universe, a state university, the county hospital, and school districts. The courthouse would displace one of those if it were reported as a single employer.

Mandatory Health Insurance IS Socialism! (for the insurance co.'s)

Jack, we ALREADY have 'socialized' medicine.. well, if you live in Taxachusetts' you do.

You HAVE to buy coverage, even if you do not need to see a doctor and are young, fit and healthy. What did the Mass. insurers do once they got all the citizens to become captive customers, little more than economic *slaves* to their companies?

Why they raised their rates over 10%!

Wasn't getting everyone covered so more people paid into the insurance pool supposed to *lower* the rates?

Well, that's how they sold it to the State government.. guess their numbers were a bit off.

Ooops! ::giggle: So sorry!! ;)

The actual *quality* of the so-called 'care' these insurers pay for hasn't risen one jot, and in point of fact, there are SO many people who now have insurance and think, "Hey, what the heck, I'm paying for it, I might as well go see a Doctor.." that there is now a waiting list in some doctor's offices over a YEAR.

Just like the waits in Europe - only unlike there, here it's the insurers that get basically months and months worth of premiums collected (free money paid to them - woo-hoo! Christmas bonuses for the CEO's!!), with the customer not even being able to get in to see a doctor.

Oh yeah, 'socialized' medicine the way private insurance practice it here, is SO much more desirable.

Deb.

Mercedes, your envy of your neighbor is SAD

Grow up and get a clue. If your

neighbor is a doctor then you

must live in a pretty nice house as well.

When you need medical help, I am sure

you sing a different tune.

Thank God we live in, for the time being, a

non socialist country. But all the pathetic

cry baby types will soon change that. Then

after they get socialized medicine they will

want socialized insurance for their home and

car.

This nation is headed to hades in a hand basket.

It has been a fun ride America.

Obscene to Profit on Illness

Vote for the Democrats, who get it regarding time for non-profit universal healthcare for the USA, such as Britain, the European democracies-allies, and Japan--even Cuba, have enjoyed for decades. My neighbor, a cardiologist, bragged about his $85,000 kitchen remake recently. Something is dangerously, psychotically wrong with medicine and healthcare in the USA. By the way, a recent visit to the local ER for a slammed fingernail created a bill for me for $1,800 plus and I got the distinct feeling that the hospital in Summit NJ was staffed by blood-lusting zombie vampires, really.

life or death

Who do they think they are? If it was them or their loved ones I bet the care would be approved. We need to put into effect a national law mandating poolicy that insurance companies can make no decisions that would or could effect the quality of a persons care. The only people with that authority would be the patient or their family and their doctor.