President Obama must move swiftly and boldly to guarantee all Americans affordable healthcare.
Frightening news about healthcare is cascading like a raging tsunami across the land.
Keep in mind that citizens of every other industrialized nation in the world, will be able to access healthcare even as the worldwide depression recession worsens. But citizens of the United States of America, do not enjoy this basic human right.
In every other industrialized nation, healthcare is a right not a privilege as it is in the United States.
Most tragically, I am literally receiving messages from sick and desperate Americans who believe at noon on January 20th (or a few hours later), President Obama will issue an executive order and wave a magic wand, so these good, tax paying Americans citizens can access the healthcare they have deferred for many long years.
Here is a piece of one such email.
nyceve
Do you think I should try and make an appointment for the tests before Janaury 20th or wait until Obama is in office?
I really need to see a doctor and I'm sure these tests will cost much more than I could possible afford.
Of course I told this person, the hell with the cost, do what Mr. Bush tells us is the preferred way to access healthcare--just go to an emergency room.
What follows is a snapshot of the Third World healthcare misery tens of millions of Americans face every single day.
I'm not going to add too much, the grotesque catastrophe speaks for itself.
This then is our American healthcare Armageddon.
It is so catastrophic that the New York Times has introduced a weekly column about what healthcare you can live without and what you must not neglect.
Health Care You Can’t Afford Not to Afford
About Patient Money
Today The Times launches a weekly column that will help readers understand and negotiate the difficult financial choices confronting health care consumers. We welcome your input and insights. The editors can be reached here.
With the recession in full swing, more and more Americans seem to be putting their health-care needs on the back burner as they struggle to handle monthly bills and day-to-day expenses.
About one in three Americans say their family has had problems paying medical bills in the past year, according to a recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit research group focused on health care. More alarming, almost half of those surveyed said someone in their family was postponing or cutting back on medical care they said they needed.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Lose your job? Think you'll continue receiving healthcare through COBRA, think again. Here's a horrifying report from FamiliesUSA which will knock the wind right out of you.
I've been telling you long before the depression began, that COBRA is absolutely unaffordable except for the most affluent.
COBRA Premiums for Family Health Coverage Consume 84 Percent of Unemployment Benefits
In 41 States, COBRA Premiums Cost More than Three-Fourths of Unemployment Benefits; in Nine of Those States, They Cost More than 100 Percent
Washington, D.C. – A report issued on the same day that the government released its latest unemployment data shows why most laid-off people are likely to lose their health coverage: The average national premium costs for family COBRA coverage consume almost 84 percent of average unemployment benefits.
The report, issued by the consumer health organization Families USA, focuses on the unaffordability of COBRA coverage, which allows laid-off workers to retain their employer-based insurance if those laid-off workers pay the full cost of that coverage.
http://www.familiesusa.org/...
Have you seen this chilling series in The Washington Post about medical debt?
I hope every goddamn politician in Washington reads it and hangs his head is horror and shame.
Pummeled by a deepening recession that is demolishing jobs and family finances, more Americans are struggling to pay their medical bills.
Americans Ensnared by Medical Debt
Bills Pile Up as Economy Fails
For years a booming economy camouflaged the burden of medical debt. Patients borrowed against their homes or whipped out credit cards, including some specially designed to pay medical or dental bills. But falling house prices and tightening credit have eliminated those options for many.
As a result, the problem of medical debt is climbing the income scale, affecting not just the poor or the uninsured. Millions of Americans covered by health insurance are paying more for less - fewer benefits, higher co-pays and additional deductibles - and are at risk for large out-of-pocket bills when serious illness or injury strike.
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/...
If you need healthcare in the United States, there's a common misperception that it's better to be a prisoner. You'll do better in prison than on the outside. Not true, read this ghastly new study from Harvard.
Remember when I told you about the UnitedHealth/Ingenix connection?
Now New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has secured a $350 million settlement against UnitedHealth for quite literally cooking the books and defrauding Americans for years.
Does everyone know how the scam works? By the way, Attorney General Cuomo called it a scam. Here's the insurance industry Ponzi. You go to an out of network doctor (if you dare to face the charges). You pay a bill for say $200. Your so-called contract with the insurer gives you a reimbursement of 70% of the reasonable and ustomary charges. So stupid us, we think we'll get a check for $140 (70% of $200), if we've met our sky high yearly deductible.
Then after fighting with the Murder by Spreadsheet insurer, we come home one night (if we still have a job), and open an envelope from the insurer and lo and behold the check is not for $140, but instead $100.00.
This is because for many years, Ingenix (owned by UnitedHealth), has been arbitrarily lowering what are called the "reasonable and customary" reimbursement rates.
As you read this, I'd ask you to keep in mind that UnitedHealth and all the other for profit health insurers just like this one, are poised to become the crown jewels of the revamped and retooled U.S. healthcare system, unless there is a storming of the garrison by the American people.
You think you're insured? Think again.
The inability to decipher the insurer’s calculations can be overwhelming to patients with serious medical conditions.
Mary Jerome, a professor at Columbia who was found to have ovarian cancer in 2006, said she had been left with unreimbursed medical bills amounting to tens thousands of dollars. Her complaints to the attorney general’s office helped spur the investigation.
Ms. Jerome, who said she had been treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering, in large part because her primary care physician recommended the hospital, expected she would have to pay no more than her $3,000 deductible for going out of network. But she said she had soon been swamped with bills that left her $70,000 to $80,000 in debt.
She found herself trying to decipher bills with more than 200 line items.
"You’re lying there in a morphine grip with someone draining your lungs, trying to figure this out, and you just cannot," she said. "It cannot be done." While Mr. Cuomo and his staff predict that the agreement will lead to sweeping changes in how insurers reimburse patients, the agreement’s success depends on the creation of a practical alternative to the existing UnitedHealth business. The database was originally set up by the insurance industry, and the other major insurers would have to cooperate with the new database for it to be able to generate valuable information.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Here's what Don McCanne MD of PNHP had to say about the Cuomo lawsuit the insurance industry crooks.
"The administrative waste of private insurers along with the excessive administrative burden they place on the health care delivery
system alone is more than enough to warrant dismissing them as stewards of
our health care dollars. A more fundamental moral reason to dismiss them is that they place service to patients in a secondary position to their efforts to achieve business success, frequently using dishonest deception to do so.
. . .And what does Karen Ignagni of AHIP have to say about this fraud? She
praises UnitedHealth for its "major leadership effort." Worse yet, what does it say about those controlling our national dialogue on reform when Karen Ignagni is included in almost every major forum, and single payer advocates such as the leadership of PNHP are deliberately excluded?"
UnitedHealth Settles Class Actions
The UnitedHealth agreement settles several class-action suits filed nearly a decade ago that contend the industry systematically underpays for doctors and hospitals that don't belong to its networks. The settlement money will go toward paying UnitedHealth plan members and physicians for out-of-network medical services performed since 1994, the company said. The settlement is subject to court approval.
. . .While Mr. Cuomo's probe encompassed at least 16 large insurers, UnitedHealth was at the center because its unit, Ingenix, operates the database that collects billing data from insurers and sells the aggregate price information back to them. Under the New York state settlement, UnitedHealth agreed to pay $50 million toward a new database, to be operated by an as-yet unidentified university, and to shut down the Ingenix database once the new system is up and running.
. . .At a news conference, Mr. Cuomo called the rate-setting practice involving the database a "blatant fraud" and "the greatest scam I've seen."
http://online.wsj.com/...
You reap what you sow.
Wellpoint has announced big layoffs. Sadly innocent Wellpoint employees will be laid off, but the truth is, healthcare in the United States is a privilege not a right, Americans are losing their jobs and their health benefits. Insurers have priced themselves right out of the market for most of us, and all of us, every last one of us, is sick and tired of paying extortion for worthless high deductible junk insurance. Many Americans who work for these parasitic organizations, will find themselves with a frightening pink slip.
Wellpoint really is a company that deserves to collapse under the weight of its own wretched corruption.
WellPoint Penalized for Botching Drug Benefits
Federal officials temporarily banned health insurer WellPoint Inc. from marketing or selling Medicare health or drug plans after they said computer problems caused it to deny thousands of seniors coverage for vital medications and cancel their benefits.
The ban, effective late Monday, is one of the toughest penalties levied on a private Medicare plan provider since the introduction of the government program's drug benefit three years ago.
In an unusually terse letter to WellPoint, the government agency that oversees Medicare said the company's "longstanding and persistent failure to comply with [Medicare] requirements" had begun to pose "a serious threat to the health and safety" of Medicare beneficiaries.
WellPoint, the country's largest health insurer, is the fourth-largest provider of Medicare drug plans. It has 1.9 million members in its prescription, or Part D, plans, as well as 472,000 members in private Medicare health-insurance plans.
http://online.wsj.com/...
And if you're one of the 50 million uninsured Americans, and you do face financial ruin due to medical bills, bargain, bargain, bargain and demand the same payment schedule as insurers receive.
God speed to President Obama and Vice President Biden.