Now with added private sector efficiency!
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Itâs realllly hard to defend insurance companies, or hospital billing departments. So I wonât.
I do wonder who should be making these decisions, if not companies and not governments. I imagine a team of actuaries and computers, who would not be distracted by empathy or profitability. But someone would have to pay those people, and even if most of the workers turned out impartial, the incentives would be there for some to behave badly.
The cognitive dissonance for me comes from knowing I may not be considered worth treating myself. On one hand, I want a law-and-order, emotion-free process to be deciding these things, and in a world with limited resources, accept that these kinds of decisions must be made. On the other hand, I have a condition that has led insurers to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep me alive. I canât claim Iâve contributed that much value to society, but just the same Iâd rather not die.
I feel similar. An older family member was diagnosed with cancer and was subsequently treated successfully. Now 5 years later she has severe dementia and no one has enough money to take care of her properly. So she lives in a state run hospital on government funds. Is she living a successful/happy/good life? Was the insurance money for cancer treatment well spent? Ultimately she was treated successfully but was it worth it? I have no idea how to answer that.
Just like the mortgage crisis. A computer decides to foreclose you. The paperwork goes to an untrained supervisor in stacks so large that she signs them all without reading.
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Except you need those machines programmed by someone well removed from the influence of the companies. They like to âfixâ things. Like the drug store chain busted for switching prescriptions to other forms because they got paid more money for those forms over the regular form. They admitted no liability and might have paid a small fine, but they walked away having pocketed tons of cash because they âbeatâ the system by noticing someone didnât update all of the drugs and programmed their computers to automatically altered the prescriptions to the profitable ones.
I doubt, actually, that the response would have been different; I donât see why an insurance company would care about the financial condition of an insured in this case, as they would have to spend the same amount either way. If anything, those with the means to do so just end up having to pay out of pocket for treatment. My uncle, for example, ended up having to pay for quite a bit of his own treatment after going over the lifetime maximum on his health insurance.
In the meantime, have a barrage of our no-information television ads, and another, and another⌠itâs incredibly expensive to make and constantly bombard the airwaves with these ads, in over a hundred channels, so weâre very proud of them! And never you mind where the money comes from.
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Then someone would have to make sure those actuaries and computers are updated with the latest medical developments and research. In the case cited, the dispute over the needed biopsy had to do with treatment developed relatively recently. Itâs amazing how statistical forecasts can get old in a hurry when youâre dealing with medical science.
I dunno. When I was an office nurse, I had an insurance company (Molina) deny a dialysis patient their dialysis. Why? Itâs an âelectiveâ surgery. I spent over on hour on the phone, going from phone monkey to phone monkey before I managed to convey that we were talking about dialysis, and itâs not elective.
I also worked at an insurance company as an LPN for a year. I had to quite because it was bloody awful. My boss got a bonus for âsaving the company moneyâ. That was for denying claims. My coworkers had literally no medical training, and would come up with the most inaccurate information, and tell it to the insured folks.
I think on a bad day, with all the failures combining, I could see it happening.
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I just got through a helluva fight with my insurance company for a genetic test. I have quite a few years of nursing under me, so I kept fighting. If I had been a layperson, I might have given up because the road blocks were just stupid levels of ridiculous.
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Hey there, those are good old American Death Panels, the ones that value profit above all. We donât want no stinking government Death Panels that want to maximize lifespans!
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Sadly, I donât think Obamacare is going to do much to change the health insurance industry. Without an option to buy into Medicaid/Medicare, youâre just dealing with the same for-profit oligarchies.
My monthly premiums at Kaiser are $666. Coincidence or Satan at the wheel?
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My mother in law may have cancer. She doesnât know for sure, because sheâs already passed her limit of doctorâs visits this year. She was also bitten by a dog recently and made do with over the counter medicines, because she couldnât afford to go to the doctor with her own money. Meanwhile my father in law keeps posting stuff on Facebook about how evil Obamacare is. The cognitive dissonance is off the scale.
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Pffft. My friend was just charged 80 pounds for seven Piriton tablets for his dog. Theyâll cheerfully charge what they can get away with.
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Lemme guessâŚThe drug store chain is the one that will no longer accept my drug coverage carrier? And further, said carrier is the one that uncovered the fraud?
Iâm sure your friend loves his superwonderful dog, and considers it equivalent to a child, so the treatment is priced as though the pet were in fact his child.
Once someone starts buying allergy medication for a pet, you have to figure itâs as good as carrying a sign that says âOvercharge This Chumpâ.
Euthanasia or refusal to treat symptoms arenât usually acceptable options for humans, of course, which is what Jeff (codinghorror) was alluding to in his post. If your friend chooses to treat his dog like a human, he brings the attendant issues.
For those who may not know who Wendell Potter is, thereâs this incredible interview that blew the lid off the corruption of our current health âcareâ system:
Every American needs to see this and spread it around
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Meanwhile my father in law keeps posting stuff on Facebook about how evil Obamacare is. The cognitive dissonance is off the scale.
I guess Iâm in agreement with him that Obamacare does massively suck at least when compared to a true single payer system:
But, I have a feeling your father in law doesnât know the difference between the two if heâs watching Fox âNewsâ or listening to right wing radio stations.
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I ended up blocking his political posts, but looking through them again the objection seems to be that Obamacare is too much like single payer systems. That, and the fact that Obama is involved.
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