Insurance company games
The American Medical Association came out with a report card this week, assessing the claims processing performance of Medicare and seven national commercial health insurers: Aetna, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, CIGNA, Coventry Health Care, Health Net, Humana and United Healthcare.
So, who most often pays the rate they’ve contracted to pay? Medicare. Our national single-payer insurance plan. If you think the government can’t do anything as well as the private sector, think again.
The big insurance companies use an incredible array of tricks to reduce or deny payments to physicians, who then must hire entire departments of people to chase down the money due them. It adds billions of dollars to healthcare costs every year while returning nothing of value. It’s pure greed and dishonesty on the part of the insurance companies, and they get away with it year after year, and tens of thousands of people die every year because they don’t have access to care.
How many of those people could be cared for with those wasted billions of dollars?
If you want to look at the report card and the press release explaining it, visit:
Tags: Patient Pals & Family Friends
Life o' Mike has a new peer support program for people newly diagnosed with chronic or serious illness or with a new disability and their caregivers.
Patient Pals are people who have experience with various illnesses and disabilities, who can help someone newly diagnosed or with a new disability work through the fear, frustration, confusion and grief often experienced in the first few months.
Family Friends are there to help caregivers and other family members grow into their new role.
People with new illness or disability fare better when they have a role model -- someone who can help them negotiate their new path in life.
We need volunteers, who are asked to donate a minimum of one hour a week. Training is free and includes information on active listening, ways to help and when to know more help is needed.
And of course, we need funding.
To learn more, call Leslie Boyd at 828-243-6712 or e-mail lifeomike@gmail.com.
I’ll just whistle while I work on that one. I do agree with my Mom on one thing. What is going on is not right. It needs to be worked on. Fixed. Lots of opinions on how to do it. Either way people need to make their voices heard and stop talking about doing something and do something. Enough with the meaningless political crap. Enough insulting our intelligence. I have a lot of ideas. My Mom has lots of ideas. There are lots of ideas. So many of them would be a step in the right direction. What happened to Mike did not need to happen. Mom is making it her mission to help people. More people help her, more people do the same, and we are moving in the right direction.