Posted on 06/02/2008 5:11:42 PM PDT by shrinkermd
“Free Market” sterilization - shocking, but that is what United Healthcare’s (UNH) subsidiary Golden Rule told a 39-year-old women in perfect health. The New York Times “After Caesareans, Some See Higher Insurance Cost” reports that private health insurers either do not issue medically underwritten policies or charge substantially higher premiums to women who have undergone Caesarean deliveries. Given that most individual policies are medically underwritten and 31.1% of deliveries are Caesarean, a large percentage of women of childbearing age are not eligible for health insurance.
The excuse is that it is statistically more likely that a second Caesarean will follow the first, costing an average of $2700 more than vaginal birth. In some states, Golden Rule will treat a Caesarean as a pre-existing condition, and exclude it for three years. Where it cannot be excluded or the exclusion period allowed is shorter, Golden Rule dictates sterilization or no insurance. Where are the pro-lifers when you really need them?
Taking a step back, we are beginning to see how far medical underwriting has gone. Healthy people are no longer guaranteed access to insurance.In addition, health insurance companies can take control of your body. As more people leave the shelter of employer provided insurance, the public will be awakened to the realities of medical underwriting. The noose is getting tighter every day.
(Excerpt) Read more at seekingalpha.com ...
Ping to you.
Insurance companies do not you to have kids. They want you to pay into the system until you need it, and then die quietly and quickly.
When euthanasia becomes widespread in the US it will be because of insurance. Be it private or socialized.
Blatant discrimination against babies. Keep this nonsence up and the US will be as sterile and doomed as Europe.
crappy insurance ping
Of course, it was necessary to de-moralize a people first. Because with a moral foundation, of course, no such thing would happen to Capitalism.
But absent the moral foundation, it is frighteningly efficient at bringing about the minifestations of communism and the cult of death and totalitarianism.
Health Insurance is nothing more than legalized scamming. You pay premiums, and they tell YOU how much of your money they get to keep. If you don’t believe it, take a look at the size of your house, and the size of their buildings.
If folks had to pay out of pocket without the insurance middleman, the market would drive the price for services down for everyone.
They have already come for the smokers,drinkers, drug users, now women at high risk pregnancies, obese is next.
The only high risk class they won’t bother is the butt banging men class.
Depopulation policy, generally unarticulated, may be the driving force behind such policies as well as the culturally ‘sudden’ gay and lesbian advocacy movements of the last 40 years. In Scotland, there is a report today of hospitals giving OR priority time for abortions at the expense of the availability of ORs for maternity services.
When I was looking for coverage, I did a common sense thing. I asked my doctors, pharmacists, and friends what plan raised their blood pressure the highest and caused the worst language.
Hands down, 100% it was USHC.
Doctor: Derisive snort, shakes head.
Pharmacist: "Oh THOSE $(%&*, they suck".
Neighbor: "My late husband had them! I am still paying off bills they refused to pay".
Maybe the premiums are cheap, like Allstate used to be..sell cheap insurance, and simply never pay claims till the summons arrives.
Sounds like this woman has a sex discrimination lawsuit!
Seriously, most insurances have decision making policies that are only a little less worse than this. It's part of the driving force behind universal health care, a/k/a socialized medicine. We've got to use market forces to drive the shoddy operators out of business, so that the other providers stay somewhat honest (and in business).
I thought Goden RUle was supposed to support Christian Values (hence the name). Sheesh! Here in Illinois, the Catholic hospital got OUT ofthe med insurance business because the state is making them cover things they cannot cover.
Yet another company/industry that has no clue what its actions are doing. I’ll tell them: making people angry and making government invent more laws and regulations that they complain about.
Police yourselves and you won’t need police.
“When euthanasia becomes widespread in the US it will be because of insurance.”
That’s what greed does.
Insurance is only necessary because so many people have it and it is difficult to make medical arrangements without it. It causes increased cost not less cost even though people are deceived into thinking it saves them money it tends to benefit only those who need the most expensive procedures and even then you end up paying a premium price for those procedures.
What amazes me is that standard procedures which are commonplace still cost so much. Typically services the more common they are the less expensive they become but the medical system seems to not respond well to the free market. I think we should import more doctors to help drive the costs down and sponsor scholarships for more doctors here at home. Also I think when the government funds the R&D for new drugs then they should have as a criteria that those drugs be made available within two years of release to companies that make generic versions. It is ridiculous that tax payers dollars are given away to produce something that is then turned around and sold to them at a premium and they have no recourse but to buy them or die.
There is a way to deal with United Healthcare when they refuse to pay, it worked for me anyway.
Being a cancer survivor, I have to go for periodic screenings. After they refused to pay for the first one, I called and asked, “When are you going to pay this?” Their response, “We don’t cover well-patient care.”
So I called the next day, and the next day, and the day after that asking the same question. Then I started calling every chance I got, sometimes a dozen times a day. After one month of this I called and asked for a supervisor. I asked her to look at her computer screen and the log of all my calls and told her to do the math and figure out how much the 1-800 calls were costing them along with taking up the time of her customer service people. Then I told her I was going to keep calling until I had cost United Healthcare 1000 times what the bill was that I had already paid the doctor. Guess what? I received a check within 3 days covering the entire cost of my screening. Persistence pays off!
IMO, mandatory health practitioner licensing needs to be eliminated, which will lead to the availability of lower-quality (but more widely affordable) health care options, which are currently eliminated from the market by regulations. The ugly truth is that regulations are responsible for pricing health-care out of the reach of many Americans - the minimum qualifications and standards are so high that affordable health-care delivery for many individuals is impossible. Look especially at legal fees and insurance costs doctors are forced to cover because contract law regulations are so perverse. Strict fidelity to contractual agreements would render health-care more affordable IMMEDIATELY.
The process could be taken further by next expanding the functions that nurses and other medical support staff, as well as pharmacists, can legally perform. This is especially true of federal regulations - having an American health-care oasis state would do a heck of a lot of good for downward harmonization.
People want to have the best of all worlds, and it is simply not possible. Something has to give, be it average affordability (too many regulations), average quality (laissez-faires policies), or average speed of service delivery (socialist policies). I'd err on the side of liberty, against compulsory collectivism.
I had my share of dealings with Golden Rule.
As far as they are concerned, contractual obligations work in one direction only.
It would have been cheaper for me to pay a high class escort to screw me.
Would this fall under the Pro-Life or Moral Absolutes ping?
I kicked hell--I demanded to talk to a supervisor and asked her where her office was, because I wanted her to examine me herself and tell me to MY face that surgery wasn't necessary. I said my doctor said my uterus was immobilized. It was on the records my doctor sent. I guess the underlings don't read patient records. The supervisor authorized it on the spot.
What was causing the pain was scar tissue from the c-section. They had to go in there and laser it. I feel sorry for these new crop of moms if the same thing happens to them and especially if they have United Health Care.
>>This is what Marx meant when he said that
>>Capitalism is doomed; that it would pass
>>through socialism into communism.
The subject of this thread is probably better described as corporatism than communism.
Having said that, however, it’s becoming quite apparent there’s really very little difference between the two; in that both subjugate the individual for the benefit of the hive.
>>either do not issue medically underwritten policies
>> or charge substantially higher premiums to women
>>who have undergone Caesarean deliveries.
That’s very interesting, given the apparent predisposition towards performing Caesareans instead of natural child birth.
I guess you either need to be an illegal alien or wealthy enough not to need insurance these days; if you want to have more than one child.
"Corporatism" seems to have been too sublime an idea for Marx, or too irrelevant, or rather too obvious a manifestation of the phenomena he described.
Yes, it worked but fundamentally, you cannot trust a place that requires you to do that just to get them to honor an obligation.
For example, my neighbor could not chase them because he was dying of lung cancer and on morphine, etc. So if you get REALLY sick and REALLY start running up bills, there will be nothing that can be done.
His widow took care of it later. After what she had been through, she made it a hobby to make them miserable. I actually think it helped her by giving her something to focus on.
Upon hearing these stories, one sees a justification for lawyers.
Being close to the described situation as I was, and am, it was a genuine struggle not to discuss that outfit with sentences that do not contain "Assault rifle","Street Sweeper", "Hand Grenades" and other antisocial utterances.
Suffice to say, the conclusion of many is that there is simply nothing bad enough that could happen to that place.
Do you have to do that every time you go in for a screening, or did the message stick with UHC?
>>too obvious a manifestation of the phenomena he described.
Marx just didn’t appreciate the concept of sovereign individuals with inalienable rights. Definitely a hive dweller - regardless of the semantic facade.
No one, absolutely no one can make sensible excuses for the individual health insurance market in most states. Yea, a 20 year old with NO health history can buy a plan for $50 bucks; so what? Many still don’t buy it.
My industry is just handing ammo to the single payer folks in attempting maintain this ridiculous status quo.
However, this market is easy to reform if someone really wanted to. You could pool people or better yet, pool certain claims and conditions to make nearly everyone acceptable and underwritable while setting up strong competition that would hold down prices.
Unfortunately, I have found Democratic lawmakers extremely hostile to any solution involving reforms to the private market. They prefer to use the disfunctional individual market as a club to beat the industry with. So far, we deserve every bit of it.
They pay everything now.
Good.
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