Doctors' group says mistakes by insurers shortchange physicians
Article Source: msnbc.com
from:msnbc.com1 in 5 health insurance claims wrongly handled
Seeded on Mon Jun 14, 2010 2:06 PM EDT (msnbc.com)
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Yep, our for-profit Republican loved healthcare system sure does work great. LOL. It's a disaster.
Can you imagine how an all-private for-profit police or fire department system would work? It would be a disaster.
Private industry works for many businesses. Healthcare is not one of them.
Republicans need to get out of the 19th century. We need a single payer system. Of course, Republicans will whine about having to wait in longer lines. Nice to know that these make-believe religious freaks are happy getting quicker healthcare, due to the less fortunate dying because of no healthcare.
Yep, Republicans are comfortable with thousands of Americans DYING every year, as long as it's someone else. Republicans are the Pro-Death Party.
Then why is Canada moving away from their system, closer to ours?
The one good thing about single payer for me is it would reduce my office staff and save overhead. The huge downside is the reimbursement rate will be controlled by the govt, which traditionally has not even kept up with inflation, and is squeezing our medical practices to death (and patients wonder why we have to rush through visits to see more patients to make ends meet).
The insurance industry is everything that’s wrong with the system. I’ve never found a reasonable explanation for why a given procedure doesn’t just cost whatever it costs no matter who’s paying.
It makes zero sense for you or me or anyone to pay another company to pay our bills, especially when it’s painfully obvious those companies are making HUGE profits. I have no issue with hospitals or doctors turning profits – those dollars can be put into research, expanding facilities, buying new technology, etc. I can’t think of anything good is done with insurance company profits.
Fixing healthcare should have been easy. Eliminate all private insurance, allow people to use FSAs to pay for their own healthcare up to a certain limit. Then we all pay into a national pool that covers costs over an income-based threshold. Healthcare prices would also need to be transparent and easy to access. That wouldn't have taken 700 pages and I think that even children can grasp the concepts.
no - we need to get the for-profit insurers out of the loop and return to the single payer (i.e. patient) system that worked for most patients and doctors before insurers inserted themselves. I suspect far more than 1 in 5 claims are mishandled - lost claims, "never received" claims, "it's too late to file now" claims are routine games played by insurance companies trying every trick in the book to avoid paying the healthcare provider for the work/care provided to the patient who deserves to have his premiums applied to his healthcare expenses as fully as possible with MINIMAL profit to the insurer. Virtually every healthcare provider office now has to invest in a fulltime crew of claims handlers just to make sure the healthcare provider and other office staff get paid for their work. Insurance companies pull every trick in the book to avoid giving back more than a pittance from the premiums they collect. The healthcare "crisis" in this country won't go away until ALL INSURERS go away and we return to a private, pay as you go system. I left private practice because of this sickening game and my father before me left private practice because of it. We just want to take care of patients and make a decent living doing it - insurers make that damn near impossible for both the physician and the patient.
what a crock
My doctor has a small family practice...him, a full time and a part time nurse, a front desk phone girl and 2.5 STAFFERS WHO'S SOLE PURPOSE IS TO DEAL WITH THE INSURANCE COMPANIES to make sure he can get paid...
Total unnecessary BS!!!
NU Wildcat -
Canada is moving away from a good system because their leader is called, "Bush-lite" up there. He wants his cronies to milk the system like insurance companies do here. Watch them for the same failed policies, it's coming soon. An opportunist in a position of power and responsibility. Hopefully the good Canadian people will learn from our mistakes before it's too late.
as long as the insurance company executives are making extremely high salaries, I do not see what the problem is
No undisconnect, if you have ever lived in countries that had a socialist healthcare system you would understand why they are moving away from it. It doesn't work. Plain and simple. No other explanation needed.
I love how the doctors want to point the finger at the insurance companies for the mistakes. Whining about all the paperwork saying it isn't necessary. I work for a health insurance company and the claims we get from doctors and or their billing companies are completely laughable. I see them every single day with nothing but the name of the patient...John Smith, no id number no address which leaves us no way to figure out who/which patient it is.....there are thousands of people with the same name...give us some help. On top of that they don't give you a date of service the procedure or a diagnosis. If we don't have the date of the service we don't know whether the patient was actually part of our insurance or not. Without the procedure we don't know if you had blood work or repair of a wound and can't pay with out that. They use old diagnosis that are no longer appropriate(these are determined by Medicare...not the insurance companies....) On top of that the doctors don't bill in time and wonder why they don't get paid. I got about 25 claims from one billing group and the bills were from 1997....yes 13 years ago......sorry we can't pay something that was that long ago...it is the law...also dictated by Medicare...ie the federal government.
The doctors think they are getting ripped off now...because of insurance mistakes.....really as I said I see hundreds every single day. You just wait until Obama care takes hold....the amount you get paid will be less than what you get paid with Medicare.........so good luck to you doctors. Try fixing your billing practices and then maybe you can point fingers........
kash - I've been saying the exact same thing for over a year. And I've been talking about standardizing cost-per-procedure, publishing that list nationally, and putting every medical bill through an outside audit system where ID is protected before a bill is issued to a patient.
Progressive Thinker, I've also been touting single payer.
So you both got a vote of course.
If what winkiesixtysix says is true in more than an isolated case here and there, then the companies submitting those claims need some new claims processors - fast. And winkie, if those are a lot of Medicare, Medicaid, or military/CHAMPVA/Tricare claims (government health care) coming from the same providers over and over, you might want to alert the oversight process. What you are describing can often indicate some less-than-honest behavior. BTW, most of the doctors I've ever been to are pretty consciencious about making sure they are circling the right coding numbers, not that I've been to all of them of course LOL.
When Congress started making 'sausage' instead of health care reform legislation, it got it all wrong. Pandering to an industry that was paid 5.6% of our entire GDP in 2007 was the biggest mistake of all - Congress are you lis...nevermind.
The real surprise in the article is that it's ONLY 1 in 5...
winkies, you work for an insurance company, but you don't seem to understand the function of a business. As the middle man in this group offering its services to customers, it is also your responsibility to come up with an easy system that requires the least time from all parties involved and allows physicians to practice medicine instead of wasting time filling out names and addresses. That contributes to the physician shortage in this country and adds to overhead costs. You have guts admitting what you do, but you have got to be one of the biggest blue falcons I have ever heard of.
I would rather die of a curable disease while homeless, than being forced to live healthily in the post-freedom hellscape envisioned by this bill. Yes. That’s my right. You heard Michele Bachmann, Jon, they want to bury my grandma alive! Oh, God knows she’s got it coming, but I decide when and I decide where! It’s what the founders would have wanted!
John Oliver.
Unless you actually work on the provider side you don’t have a clue about the administrative burden the health insurance industry forces on providers. Staff spends hours on the phone trying to plow through poorly written voice recognition software in an attempt to reach a human. Many times when they get through they get a message telling them that they are in a staff meeting and call back later.
Everything a provider does have to go through the laborious preauthorization process. If a test or procedure is approved it is done with the qualification that “this does not guarantee payment” setting the provider up for another battle. If the test or procedure is denied clinicians have to time away from patient care to help their patients fight through the insurance companies internal appeal process. Of course the appeal process is a complete waste of time as they have already made the decision.
One of their new tactics with surgery is a last minute denial. They hope that the surgeon & hospital’s concern for the patient will lead them to do the procedure without preapproval. The patient will get the surgery, and the insurance company will refuse to pay for it. While all this is going on the patient suffers and their disease process progresses.
We flush, and even with “health insurance reform’ will continue to flush billions down the toilet on the care and feeding of the insurance industry
I'm sure the percentage points will rise very soon as there will be fewer persons in the system due to Obamacare. It will be easier to do a good job, until the company closes when too many accounts are lost due to the unaffordable, increased cost of care under the "new" plan.
Thanks for NOTHING!!!!!
+Comment collapsed by the Insurance Industry.
Government claims are handed wrongly 2 out of 3 times. Thus the private sector is still doing much better.
It's $1000 per person, just to process these claims. How is that better?
Now you should ask if it is $1,000 per person does that even make sense. No company could survive if they made 20% errors and had to double those efforts. Did anyone ask where the information came from? Was it measured on a submitted claim basis and from the doctors office's opinion...that's certainly not biased. The public accepts these articles condeming some business or person because it make good reading but no sense, which is what you have when you just accept these "fluff" pieces that pander to the ignorant!
Why is Canada moving away from a single payor system. You can now get treatment in Canada by paying so you move up in the line. Germany is broke and having to cut benefits, ie there is more out of each individual's pocket. They only pay 8 or 9% of their income for this health care.
We have health care on demand. What until the goverment tells you who to see and what treatment is allowed. Go to the DMV and tell me how that experience is unless you don't wok and have nothing else to do.
Except for some specialties, Canadian doctors are making as much as US counterparts with much less billing headaches and fear of liability. Healthcare is universal meaning everyone is covered. The cost of healthcare to the nation is much less. The outcome as measured by longevity of the population is better. The Canadian system is better.
In the book The Healing of America the author talks about the french using a computer microchip on a card that holds all their data, which they possess, when they see a doctor or a pharmacist the doctor swipes the card and inputs the visit data, bills the government for the visit. The pharmacist does the same thing when looking at the prescription. The doctor is paid by law within 7 days for the care given. Everything in america is so complex that our system will fail from the complexity of it all.
Pleeeze - give me a break. I work for a large national insurance carrier and can't tell you how many times the claims come in completly wrong from the docs and hospitals. Things such as the wrong modifiers or billing for $80 for a freekin bedpan! I certainly will hold a claim for those kind of things and make the hosp figure out what the heck its doing. If the claim comes in clean it gets auto-adjudicated and paid quickly - if there are mistakes its because the billers at place of service made an error.
The bedpan bill would have come on a hospital bill, not from the dr's office. Are you sure you work for a national carrier? when you don't know a UB from a HCFA?
I'm with you! Our clinic bills over half of their billings wrong. Wrong modifiers, they bill individually for CPT codes that should be bundled, bill for things not done, etc. etc. etc. etc!!
And overcharge! They'll charge $1,000 to a private insurance that from Medicare they would get about $280 for the Part B payment and patient co-pay. Our insurance has a preferred provider contract with them. They accept huge discounts, but if you don't have insurance, they charge the entire amount.
I've put off some health care because of the cost even with insurance and I know one gentleman who knew he had cancer but didn't get any care because the copay he would have had to pay would have left his wife in bankruptcy.
While you appear to be making a case against the provider, you instead make an excellent case against the entire process - especially that of the insurer. Lynda will just hold a claim and make the provider "figure out what the heck it's doing". So there is no communication that explains that the claim is wrong, and the insurance company can withhold payment for as long as possible, probably earning substantial interest on these funds.
For the uninitiated, there are codes for diagnoses, procedures, etc. Certain things should be bundled together, some things should not. The codes are not exact, so if you pick the wrong one you receive substantially less payment. Bundle it wrong, and again you get the wrong (and probably lower) payment. Or maybe Lynda just decides to hold the claim, and you don't know what the heck happened. Oh, and guess who is the judge and jury - the insurance company. They decide if the claim is correct, how much they will pay and when.
We as providers are offered contracts that allow us to treat their insured, with a fee schedule set by the insurance company. If you don't like it don't sign, but who can afford to turn away a large group of patients, especially if you are in a small community or it is a large insurer?
Providers are not guilt free either. The term used by many is "maximizing reimbursement". We should be paid for what we do, but many "game" the system to get a little bit more. Claims have to be carefully scrutinized as a result. So it becomes a game - providers maximizing reimbursement, insurers trying to minimize it - just what should be going on with health care. Keep it simple, make it fair and pay us a reasonable amount for the care provided. That shouldn't be that hard. There are a lot of good ideas out there, but there are too many fingers in the pie to make a change. The system will eventually collapse under its own weight, our quality of care will become worse (don't kid yourself that we have the "finest" care in the world), and only those with lots of money will have adequate care.
The whole point is that insurance companies have no reason for being. A single payer system would clarify all these issues and physicians would KNOW what is covered. Insurance companies are taking 15% of the bill to make all these mistakes and are providing NO health care.
Except for INSURANCE COMPANY DEATH PANELS!
I work for a hospital and know that a bedpan is billed on a UB and will go under rev code 0270. No modifier is needed as there will be no HCPCS, idiot.
Some of the dr.'s don't deserve to get paid. One in peticular is Dr. Richard Horak in Opelika Al.
I love the...Even though Medicare processes claims accurately..
How can MSNBC make that statement when the Medicare claims weren't even looked at? I think that the liberal writers of MSNBC have an agenda that pushes public payers over private ones. In other words, same crap different day...
Medicare processes correctly, a claim that is not "clean" is returned to the provider for adjustment before being paid. Although, sometimes this may depend on the FI (fiscal intermediary) who is processing the claims for Medicare. Until recently, some of them had computer programs equivalent to a "Pong" game!
Enma, Medicare's filters do not necessarily filter out bad claims. They filter out some things, but they do not always pay claims accurately. Medicare often misses things. They are a huge bloated bureaucracy (I'd call it more like a pile of crap-but I'll use the word bureaucracy) and they make plenty of mistakes.
Insurers purposefully delay payments, knowing that some offices will give up and, even for the ones who don't, they'll make money on the interest!
As a doctor, if I make a mistake, it's called malpractice; in their industry, it's called standard operating procedure!
Yes, some do delay processing a claim. But, some providers do not follow up on delayed or denied claims and just bill the patient as that is easier than trying to figure out what the delay or denial is. That is equally wrong!
I did health care billing for several years, I always kept on top of my billings, fixed a bill if incorrect or called the insurance company to see what the problem was. I sure wish the providers I have would take the time to at least try to correct their errors and at least attempt one follow-up.
You are correct!
How did you get a medical degree? Look at the money market moron. Holding money really pays. The state fines alone make it too costly. If the idiot providers would submit a reasonable charge there wouldn't be any issues. You get it right and the law makes sure you get paid timely. I am glad I am not your med mal carrier.
Some Dr.'s don't deserve to get paid. Especially Dr. Richard Horak in Opelika Al.
Physicians complaining about reimbursement pains me. I know several physicians in private practice that work 2 1/2 to 3 days per week that still draw a full salary, and the junior partners are enslaved to them. Many more are working 3 or 4 days a week and draw full salaries. The physicians (primary care and speciality) I know enjoy their lifestyles, and don't complain about not making enough money. Don't be bamboozled by the claims of working long hours, taking call, holidays, etc. Most physicians have a a VERY good salary, and a very comfortable lifestyle. The growing trend in healthcare is for physician extenders (physician assistants and nurse practitioners) is to take call in many specialties. Physicians today work far less than than the physician of just 20 years ago. It's human nature...you're never paid enough. Greed.
Physicians, is this true???
The ones I worked for (I was building their multi-million dollar vacation homes) were on the jobsite four or five days a week for the majority of the day for the entire summer.
Tough life...
After reading this article and worked as the third party for a health insurance company, this is very much true. The things I seen happening to patients accounts was horrible. Not only was the training and software to work pateints claims a joke, but know one wanted to help. I watch empoyee's take smoke breaks, keep doctor offices on hold for ever, and deny claims because the employee didn't know what to do. My company worked on paid and deny system not on how the claim was to be processed. If incorrect paper work was sent, a new letter was sent out, claim closes out after 45 days and is turned over to collections. All because of poor training. When I quit this company I had to do an exit interview and I told them what was going on, but they didn't care. I knew this was wrong, because I worked as an underwriter before this job and knew the credit issues this company was causiing it's customres. But know one cared. It was all about the dollar. Obama is on the wrong track, it's not the doctor's billing, it is the person processing the claim. I could go on, but space is limited. Read your EOB'S know your health insurance pay's. By law a company is suppose to send you a new plan summary every year. Do you get one ?
I do medical collections for a living and I can tell you insurance companies only look for reasons not to pay a claim even if the doctor performed the service for the benefit of the patient.
The thing is, the insurance is a contract between the patient and the insurance company. Doctors file insurance claims FOR the patient as a courtesy. If the patients waited as long to pay their premiums as the insurance company takes to pay the doctor's, the patient wouldn't have insurance. It's time for the patients to revolt against slow pay and incorrect payment!
Figures!!
That explains the $30.00 dollar band-aids. LOL
One third of our premium dollars are waisted on administrative costs. Private health insurance companies operate at 30% overhead for administrative cost while Medicare operates at 3%. Medicare a government program is much more efficient than that of the private sector. By eliminating private insurance companies from our health care system and going to Medicare for all we would save about 350 billion a year, enough to provide universal coverage to everyone at no additional cost.
http://www.pnhp.org/
Oh, come on! A 20% error rate? Can you imagine a manufacturing line that continued to rake in huge profits and had a 20% scrap rate? Can you imagine a dry-cleaner who had to re-do 20% of their laundry? Give me one reason why these insurance companies should get away with a 20% error rate?
And this is the BEST this country can do?
I don't have any cold, hard statistics to refer to, but I CAN say it is very frustrating trying to get claims paid for one of our children. She was born with a birth defect and has had 10 corrective surgeries to date. We have been with the same insurer for her entire life and even (supposedly) have a case manager assigned to her claims, yet after her surgery last year, we had to have the surgeon send pictures going back to age 1 month to PROVE that she indeed did have a cleft lip & palate!! Are you kidding me?? IF that wasn't just for someone to have something to point at and laugh... Then, of course, they demanded letters showing the medical necessity of the procedure-twice, because they lost the first one! And it still took 10 months before the claim was finally paid. THAT is what is wrong with the insurance industry in our country.
You're absolutely right, and they've got you over the "pre-existing" barrel! It's a very frustrating process. God bless you and your child.
I couldn't agree with Paula-755953 more!
"Doctors have long complained about excessive paperwork required to satisfy insurance companies."
I'd like to complain about how difficult it is for the patient to provide everything to satisfy the insurance while the doctor's billing clerk continously refiles a claim (10 times) although they've been in a contract with the same insurance company for years, yet seem to have no idea how the system works. If anything the patient deals with more stress from insurance companies than anyone else. I have NEVER been sick in my life but fell ill in September with a kidney stone (because of numerous errors on the doctors part I wasn't taken care of until January by another doctor in my home state), yet had to do numerous things to prove this was not a pre-existing condition.
I've fought with the insurance company until the end of May this year trying to give them the information they want while the doctor's refiled the claims over and over when I constantly told them what needed to be done (9 months worth of phone calls). You give them one thing and it's not good enough, you give them another thing...still not good enough. It's an endless loop of the insurance not wanting to pay and the doctor wanting to harasse and sue you because you haven't paid them their money and don't care about problems with the insurance.
I've spent up to 4 hours talking to ONE person trying to settle what needed to be done..of course to no avail. The doctors go in and do their hour procedure (priced at $19,000) then have an employee do the claims (I assume) so then who has to deal with all the problems in between? The patient.
The article is right we could save at least 15B. However, we need to understand how a claim works. Healthcare companies contract with Hospitals and provides at guaranteed rates. Once that is agreed upon, the provider is given a set of codes either to manually or automatically populate the codes which populate the services. Assuming the contracted provider follows the correct procedure codes most claims are auto adjudicated (auto paid) and everyone get their money. The percentage of wrongly filed claims is more than 80% of the problem. If we could have our providers on the same page and have the claims filled in automatically or auto filled we could reduce much of the turn around and pay out times. It’s easy to blame insurers when you don’t understand the system. Most Healthcare companies offer provider customer support to help get these filled out correctly or escalated appropriately when the provider office makes a mistake. It is in the best interest of all to keep the government in the supervisory mode and not in the process. Having government in the middle creates more report, more audits and takes away from the ability to actually process claims. On the 20% opportunities that Healthcare companies should follow a specific guideline and try to minimize the codes or simplify to coding process. The room for error becomes less and less as redundancy set in with the same codes. This is a partnership not a finger pointing game and clearly there are two sides to every story but generally no one want to hear the other side.
All of this goes to show that in this country:
1. There is no system. Each company has its own codes, own forms, own every thing...Kind of like the commercial that Xerox does showing the people trying to get cost out and the fellow finally says., "How much does all this stuff cost"...kind of the same thing
2. If you base health care on profit, you will get profit, not health care.
The health insurance industry is exempt from federal antitrust laws. They are accountable to no one. That was not effectively changed by the health care legislation recently enacted. These companies will continue to rape the American consumer at will.
on march 9 2010 a drunk driver hit the front of my truck, the drunk driver was at fault. i sustained injuries to my spinal column. my insurance company has fought me tooth and nail to get any help, especially medical help. they went so far as to hire a medical claims doctor to say that i've been mircously healed to get them out of helping me in my plight. then last weak they stopped paying my benifits without any type or kind of notification. this is the exact reason alot of americans do not stand behind the governments policy of forcing americans to pu7rchase health insurance. the goverment has yet to pass any laws to protect the citizens of the united states from insurance companies trying to get out of thier responseabilitys to the insured.
Any of you out there who believe claims are "mis-handled" are naieve/stupid. The longer the insurance companies can keep from paying a claim, the longer that money stays in the investment pool making interest for the company. The interest made exceeds the money "lost" due to "mis-handling". Plain and simple--it is a way to hold on to the money to earn interest. Remember, the interest rate they earn is a lot bigger than what you or I could earn on our investments because the Insurance companies have vast sums to invest and can demand a higher rate for it.
Standardize a system.
Insurance commissions should be all over this stuff. Oh I forgot, their part of the "Public Sector".
For everyone who raged against health care... this is YOUR fault! We could have had a better system, but you folks sided with the health insurance companies and now we are theirs!! We gave away ANY opportunity to better the system!! So while you TEA PARTIERS were out there skilling for the insurance companies, telling everyone how much BETTER the private insurance companies were than the government....SHUT THE HELL UP AND PUT UP!! I don't give a rat's a$$ how unfair or cheated YOU feel because you made your bed with the slime of the earth and now YOU have to deal with it!!!
I fought on this message board for months telling you people how bad it was, and I was called a socialist, facsist!
Absolutely correct, blueinoregon. But the insurance companies are experts in confusing the weak-minded. All along, they've been calling this health care reform to divert people from calling for what was REALLY needed. Insurance reform! Our Healthcare system is second to nobody in this world. All important people from every country in the world know this (WE are the only stupid people who don't). That's why any of them with the means to do so come here for serious medical needs.
Insurance companies are the criminals. Billing 'mistakes'? Must always be in their favor if they're still raking in hundreds of billions in profit with an average 20% industry-wide 'error' rate. A couple of insurance company billing workers above complained of 'hospital', 'doctor' or 'clinic' filing errors with wrong codes, wrong filing procedure, wrong paperwork...so create an industry-wide standard for every filer, the same for every insurance company, with the same codes and the same filing procedure, and a uniform rate per medical procedure/drug/appliance that doctors can look up and say, "This is what they'll pay. This is what I can charge." Like someone else said, a child could figure THAT out. Why won't they? Because they don't WANT to make it easy, they want to be able to cheat, delay, deny and steal.
They succeeded in crushing Hillary in the 90s by starting the 'she's a woman, nobody elected her to office, she belongs in the kitchen baking cookies.' Remember, it got all the likewise-thinking, chest-thumping chauvinists to crawl out from under their rocks and shout her down. Really? Since when do you have to be elected to some political office to do the right thing? Bill should have been ashamed of himself for not stiffening his backbone and supporting her. We could have had insurance reform fifteen years ago. They certainly did not want her in the White House, so they backed Obama with money, plenty of it. But then, when they realized that Obama was serious about reforming the industry, they sent out over a hundred lobbyists with millions of dollars to buy congress to stop him. They bought all the Republicans, naturally, and they also were able to buy enough crooked Democrats to get, first and foremost, the 'Public Option' off the table, because they knew that was their most dangerous threat to business as usual. Plus they were able to water the rest down to ineffectual lip service. Same as the banks and mortgage companies were able to do.
It utterly amazes me that they can do this and still find morons who chime in on their bandwagon when they cry 'socialism' or 'facism' or 'government takeover' at any attempt to stop their thievery.
The trouble is, blueinoregon, now WE ALL have to deal with it. That's what a worthless nation of ignorant sheep who can't think one thought of their own has done to us all!
not a socialist, just ignorant
Blueinoregon:
"For everyone who raged against healthcare...." - what in god's name are you talking about? You got the "healthcare" you wanted - ObamaCare was foisted on an unwilling populace by officials - Democratic-party officials - the vast majority of whom were elected by dutiful and obedient progressives such as yourself - with nary any opinion of the tea-partiers taken into consideration. Considering the current healthcare regulation was passed along a party line vote by your kind, you pathetic left-wingers now own this system lock, stock and syringe.
I doubt I've seen such a blatant example of psychological transferrence on these boards, and that's saying a lot. If you didn't get single-payer paradise, blame your Teleprompter Jesus, Barack Obama and the party in control of Congress. But you can't, right? Because it would be too hard to admit your slimy political gods straight up sold you out.
There's a reason ObamaCare doesn't kick in for a few years, and it isn't because the tea-partiers "made poor Barack do it". Even Obama knows that, as bad of a system as we currently have, a populace exposed to the full brunt of the new government-controlled system would never vote him in for a second term. That, and the fact that the alleged cost "savings" of the new system were illusory unless we were taxed for ObamaCare for a number of years, without receiving any of the alleged benefits. [And that's without even taking into account the fact that those illusory "savings" never existed, and that the OMB estimated the cost to be more than under the current system.]
If the glorious wonders of socialized medicine didn't arrive immediately, well, now who's to blame for that? [I know it's likely that anytime you hear the word "blame" you reflexively stick your face out like a pig snorting for truffles while shouting "Boooosh! Boooosh!" but that guy isn't in office anymore.]
People like you aren't interested in the quality or accessibility of healthcare. You're interested in reducing everyone to a state of equality and the exercise of social control in the name of "fairness". And if that means we all end up picking kernels of corn out of dung like they do in North Korean prison camps, I'll bet you'd be all for it.
So do us all a favor. Walk to a mirror, look yourself in the face, and congratulate yourself on a job well done. This is YOUR healthcare system.
[Oh, and word to MSNBC. Your attempts at manipulating Americans to stop worrying and learn to love socialized medicine are so blatantly obvious, I'm actually developing secondhand embarassment. Sadly, by the time Americans catch on, they'll have replaced a bad system with a horrific one. I'll take my cues on a centralized government-controlled socialized system of medicine from the stories in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. You might do well to cover some of the same subject matter on occasion.]
I was just filing a claim online with my house insurer. My refrigerator's compressor burned out. Seven pages of information, much of it repeated three times, the names of three witnesses to prove I'm telling the truth, (for a busted refrigerator!) and then just above the final submit button, this warning from my state.
Any person who, with a purpose to injure, defraud or deceive any insurance company, files a statement of claim containing any false, incomplete or misleading information is subject to prosecution and punishment for insurance fraud, as provided in RSA 638.20.
Love it! The State and Federal Governments fall all over themselves to protect these poor insurance companies from us 'cheaters'. Who the hell protects us from those 'thieves'?
M Kay,
This is NOT the health care reform I wanted or anyone wanted, except the insurance companies!! That is why the insurance companies poured millions and millions of dollars into the TEA PARTY movement. The insurance companies paid for buses to bus people around to town hall meetings so they could act like fools yelling at the elected officials.
I wanted a PUBLIC OPTION, so I wouldn't have to deal with a private company! Been there done that have the horror stories to tell. I much wanted real reform, but the REPUBLICANS, if you remember, kept voting against it!! So the bill got watered down and watered down until it was a gift for the private insurance companies!!!
I am very interested in the "quality" of care! I just don't think Rush Limbaugh and those as UBER Wealthy as he, should be the only ones getting quality care!! One's care shouldn't depend on how wealthy they are, it should depend on if medical science can improve their quality of life. You must take the stand that Paris Hilton's life is more valuable than Steve Hawkins, after all Paris is Wealthier!! Let the rich pay for private hospital rooms and better food, or a private nurse, be let even the least of us have some kind of care.
Being a Christian I beleive we should extend at least some health care to all, after all that is what Jesus would do. There are millions of working people out there who work hard and have NO health care, they are your servers at restaurants, your clerk at Walmart, the boy who pumps your gas, all these people deserve to have health care, just like they deserve air to breath and food to eat!!
CIGNA is, in fact, the worst one at promptly processing its claims, as stated in this article. Of course, the CEO continues to profess that "we nail the basics and flawlessly execute the fundamentals". Ha!! I can tell you that as a former employee of this company, I had to tell them (as a COBRA member) how to administer their own benefit plans and how to process their own claims.
They "nail" the premiums then "execute" both the doctor and the patient.
I wonder if Doctor were being short changed on what they submitted or on what they should have charged.
It is too bad that Patients do not have someone too see about the billions of dollars in unnecessary administrative costs they have to pay the doctors.
No! Really? Health insurance firms causing billions of dollars of losses to our medical system?! Golly that's really hard to believe.
The health insurance companies are so arrogant that they won't listen to other organizations about technology that will speed up adjudication of claims or make the system better, faster & less expensive. Of course if they listen and adapt, they would have to pay out their money faster and that would cause them to make less exhorbitant profits. Unconscionable thieves with our money - sound like Wall Street to anyone?