Doctors want to practice medicine and discuss having the 3rd party calling the shots, the health insurance companies. If you missed the show, you can watch is all here and see real discussions and interviews or use the link below to view on NBC. Also, you will see an old familiar face, Wendell Potter telling it how it works from the inside, they don’t see people, they deal with numbers. He says internally that the executives are so wrapped up in their numbers that they are incoherent when it comes to the human side of life.
Part of what is discussed here is the time it takes to get treatments approved and the timing that is needed where patients can’t sit and wait for a long process to take place and fail. Sometimes a delayed decision ends up equaling a denial of treatment. One individual said the insurance company sometimes gives out wrong numbers or fax numbers. The man who had the heart attack was an IT Tech and the story is about the family taking care of his son.
I have always said health insurance should be non profit, as it was designed to be, but what is interesting is now that we need to use ‘non-profit advocacy” groups to negotiate with the health insurance companies, so what if they were non profit to begin with and focusing on dividing the cost over a large group of people, just exactly how insurance initially was designed.
Wendell Potter says he lost his sense of being human while at Cigna. He says that money spent on patient care is a loss when compared to profit. I found out watching here too, that if your insurance is from your employer, you can’t sue. Benefits change routinely and nobody can keep up with the plans provide. The one advocate promotes “education” so you know up front what the battle may be. On individual states that the complicated contracts are made that way intentionally to provide holes as escape routes. BD
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