What a curious question this was, part of a comment on an article that was posted to digg.com.
patosanpatosan
7 hr 16 min ago
“Want a level playing field? How about getting rid of private health insurer’s immunity to the sort of antitrust laws that prevent collusion and price-fixing.”
The government is a monopoly who cannot be sued in any case unless they say it’s ok and under specific circumstances (i.e. sovereign immunity).
“We’ve got an entire industry who is providing an essential service but their primary motive is profit.”
The same could be said of your local grocery store. Do you object to your local grocer?
How do you feel about this? Of course, you know I’m going to tell you how I feel…
The grocery store, what a curious analogy. I”m trying to picture a system where you pay premiums to a few big distributors that permit you to get partial reimbursements for the food you buy. You must pay your deductible before it kicks in, and there are co-payments that are so expensive that you often decide to go without in spite of your “food insurance policy”.
Food stores are required by the “food insurance industry” to maintain massive billing departments that examine each purchase to make sure it qualifies for reimbursement with the shopper’s “food insurance company” before deciding whether to bill the company or the customer. Often they need to make a great many phone calls to get approval for the customer’s purchase of some item.
People often go bankrupt because of food they must have despite the fact that they have policies, and policies are canceled simply because the companies decide people are getting too much food.
At the same time, people who have no “food policy” must pay 3-100 times as much for the same food. Sometimes when they are shopping the store will decide they must pay in advance before even allowing them to shop, and at other times the food stores will just round them up, put them in vans, and dump them on the street in another part of town in front of a competitor.
That’s where a sick person files a major claim on an existing insurance policy, a policy that they have been paying premiums for for years. Maybe the condition is some kind of cancer or other condition that may require long-term treatment to assure recovery.
The standard insurance company policy is to comb through all the patient’s records to see if there is something they inadvertently forgot to admit to when they first got the policy, something like acne or a sprained ankle. The company then claims fraud, denies the claim and rescinds (or cancels) the policy.
The person who is responsible for discovering justification gets a bonus, and if they cancel enough policies over a year, they get a big raise. For killing people.
At an insurance company hearing this past Tuesday, insurance company executives declared that they would continue this policy, even if they were taking part in a reform plan intended to increase coverage.
Hello? Thanks for clearing up the confusion. We here were under the impression that public mandates or taxpayer spending meant that abuses would be curtailed or, like, go away. Now that we know that bad faith is the plan, we can make out plans, too.
Watch Sicko to understand about how the health insurance industry takes advantage of sick policyholders to reap obscene profits. And kill them. I’m uploading now.
The health insurance industry has come out in favor of a mandate for the uninsured to buy insurance. They’re willing to work with the Obama administration on this, bringing their expertise into the negotiations. They’re even willing to extend coverage to everyone, even those with pre-existing conditions.
Let me guess. They’re going to accept people with pre-existing conditions, but they will find a way to deny these costs. Or the co-pay and deductible will still make it impossible for sick people to get health care whenever they need it.
Thr uninsured and the uninsurables will be required to buy at least the minimum policy being offered, and with the insurance companies writing the law, it will be neither cheap nor generous.
If the pool includes all the poor people currently uninsured, plus all those who are currently uninsurable, that’s a huge chunk of cash. Another way to say it is that this will be a huge chunk of wealth, and the insurance companies are salivating at the idea of getting Washington to redistribute that wealth directly from the lowest income people, with no influence in Washington, to them.
This will be a hefty tax on the uninsured and the uninsurables, the ones who can least afford it.
Why are they willing to enter negotiations? They’ve heard the phrase “single-payer”, and they’re scared to death. That’s literally scared to death, as it will mean the end of the money machine pumping our health care dollars into the black hole of American health insurance.
The New Yorker has said it all too well. As we continue to privatize health care distribution in this country, as overall costs soar, but coverage continues to decline precipitously, the question is never asked, “How’re we doin’?” Or if the question is asked, the answer never seems to involve results. Or maybe it’s that the “results” that are weighed are unrelated to the effective distribution of health care in this country, nor to the cost-effectiveness of the care that we as citizens receive.
I’ve said many times that the purpose of health care delivery systems in other countries is to deliver health care, while the purpose of ours in this country is to make sure that nobody who does not deserve health care gets it, regardless of how much it costs to make sure this does not happen. Or gets a subsidy. Subsidies are parceled out to the well-to-do, not to the poor, who by the mere fact that they have chosen to remain poor have proven that they deserve no help whatever.
The situation in this country is best illustrated by the situation of the woman who was injured, brain-damaged, and permanently disabled while working at walmart. Her lawyers won a settlement from the insurance company, and walmart’s lawyers have sued her to regain the costs of care they had already doled out. A woman on a forum I post on said that she was “double-dipping”, trying to get paid twice. Excuse me? I don’t think she was doing anything except vegging out in the nursing home where she has no choice but to live, at least until they put her out on the street for lack of funds.
Only in this country is it considered a positive moral imperative to turn people out of a nursing home to die on the street.
