If you still can't define Murder by Spreadsheet, I promise, you will know what it is after you read this diary.
I've told you over and over about the volume of emails I receive begging me to say or do something--to make the pain go away. Who the hell am I? I'm nobody. I'm a blogger, sitting behind a computer. I want to vomit every day when I read about the endless atrocities inflicted on the American people.
WHERE ARE OUR ELECTED OFFICIALS? WHAT ARE THEY DOING FOR YOU AND ME AND OUR ELDERLY?
I know one thing, the people who write to me are echoing the desperate feelings of the American people.
Even more horrendous, I often get the sense that these are the voices of large numbers of Americans who have given up on our public servants to do their jobs.
Today is such a day, but it comes courtesy of the New York Times. And I'll say parenthetically, that it seems we must insist from our presidential nominee, whoever that person turns out to be, that said person be required to lay out a full, complete and comprehensive package of healthcare and insurance industry reform.
Message to Democratic candidates: This is called full disclosure. We don't vote until we know what the hell it is we're voting for. Understood?
This is the pornography being reported this morning by the New York Times.
Aged, Frail and Denied Care by Their Insurers
Mary Rose Derks was a 65-year-old widow in 1990, when she began preparing for the day she could no longer care for herself. Every month, out of her grocery fund, she scrimped together about $100 for an insurance policy that promised to pay eventually for a room in an assisted living home.
. . .But when she filed a claim with her insurer, Conseco, it said she had waited too long. Then it said Beehive Homes was not an approved facility, despite its state license. Eventually, Conseco argued that Mrs. Derks was not sufficiently infirm, despite her early-stage dementia and the 37 pills she takes each day.
After more than four years, Mrs. Derks, now 81, has yet to receive a penny from Conseco, while her family has paid about $70,000. Her daughter has sent Conseco dozens of bulky envelopes and spent hours on the phone. Each time the answer is the same: Denied.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Let me say this to any elected official sitting in Washington about to go to an appointment with a lobbyist instead of doing our business.
I'm going to echo Barbara Boxer, elections have consequences.
What you're reading today is about predatory, Murder by Spreadsheet unregulated insurance companies denying claims to our most vulnerable. But we know this is the for-profit insurance industry business model. This is what millions of Americans are subjected to day-in and day-out across the United States.
Yet thousands of policyholders say they have received only excuses about why insurers will not pay. Interviews by The New York Times and confidential depositions indicate that some long-term-care insurers have developed procedures that make it difficult — if not impossible — for policyholders to get paid. A review of more than 400 of the thousands of grievances and lawsuits filed in recent years shows elderly policyholders confronting unnecessary delays and overwhelming bureaucracies. In California alone, nearly one in every four long-term-care claims was denied in 2005, according to the state.
"The bottom line is that insurance companies make money when they don’t pay claims," said Mary Beth Senkewicz, who resigned last year as a senior executive at the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. "They’ll do anything to avoid paying, because if they wait long enough, they know the policyholders will die."
We all have personal experience with the fully out-of-control, predatory insurance industry. The American people know this is the truth. We know insured Americans are fearful of getting necessary healthcare because they know, though insured, they will still be saddled with enormous bills. This is called cost shifting. We know the business model of the for-profit insurance industry is to delay, deny and deceive.
In 2003, a subsidiary of Conseco, Bankers Life and Casualty, sent an 85-year-old woman suffering from dementia the wrong form to fill out, according to a lawsuit, then denied her claim because of improper paperwork. Last year, according to another pending suit, the insurer Penn Treaty American decided that a 92-year-old man had so improved that he should leave his nursing home despite his forgetfulness, anxiety and doctor’s orders to seek continued care. Another suit contended that a company owned by the John Hancock Insurance Company had tried to rescind the coverage of a 72-year-old man when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease four years after buying the policy.
In court filings, all three companies said the denials had been proper. They declined further comment on the cases, though Bankers Life and John Hancock eventually settled for unspecified amounts.
Here it is in the New York Times. When will the Congress of the United States, make these insurance company thugs and liars, take an oath and decribe their muderous and depraved business practice?
Conseco is among the nation’s largest insurers, collecting premiums worth more than $4.2 billion in 2006, of which long-term-care policies contributed 21 percent. Penn Treaty focuses primarily on long-term-care products and collected premiums of about $320 million in 2004, the last year the company filed an audited annual report.
In depositions and interviews, current and former employees at Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty described business practices that denied or delayed policyholders’ claims for seemingly trivial reasons. Employees said they had been prohibited from making phone calls to policyholders and that claims had been abandoned without informing policyholders. Such tactics, advocates for the elderly say, are becoming common throughout the industry.
I urge you to read the rest of this nauseating article. Then pick up the phone and call your public servant and ask them to explain this.
Yet these concerns have been ignored by state regulators, advocates say, and have gone unnoticed by federal lawmakers who recently passed incentives intended to promote purchases of long-term-care policies, in the hopes of forestalling a Medicare funding crisis.
By the way, as I write this I am listening to Joe Biden, MBNA Delaware on Imus in the Morning. He essentially just apologized for his pal Pete Dominici. Can somebody post a transcipt and nail Biden's ass?
You see my friends, at the end of the day, they are all in bed together. They are (mostly) all in Washington for only one reason, to maintain themselves in office.
Doing our business is barely a blink on the radar screen.