Roberts: "What people now have is an insurance agent standing between them and their doctor, and everybody knows that"
June 21, 2009 12:05 pm ET
From the June 21 edition of ABC's This Week:
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Media Matters: The Palin chronicles
The Friday Rush: A series of conflicts
Contrary to media hype, Sarah Palin is very unpopular
Except I think he really knows, and is only trying to use the old GOP trick of instilling fear in the listening audience - in his case this morning on FoxNews Sunday.
Health Insurance Claims Reviewers have stood between health care provider's medical recommendations and patient care for decades now.
Cokie is right. Everyone knows this. Even Sen Graham.
Why won't the Republicans fight fair fights? Why? Because they know they'd lose if they fought this fight fairly, so their only choice is to instill fear in the undereducated public.
When I'm getting a dental checkup, the dentist's wife is in the next room on the phone questioning insurance agents on behalf of their patients, trying to obtain payments for care.
After my son's last dental checkup, the dentist's invoice included remarks to effect of my insurance company being completely unresponsive to multiple requests for payment and that they simply gave up.
It makes me wonder how much care providers could save in overhead costs if they didn't have to hire sufficient staff to wrestle with insurance agents from multiple companies.
I'm a doc. In my office, 33%.
The issue is that Lindsay Graham and others keep trying to make the point that the government is going to be a gatekeeper, but our point is that there are already gatekeepers with people who use health insurance.
It's not that the government offered insurance won't have gatekeepers though. No one is claiming that, so you're offering a strawman argument.
What article all I see is a video clip? Am I missing something?
I also understand your point. My point is that If the government is the gatekeeper I believe things will get much worse. Higher cost, decreased quality ect.. I work for the federal government taking care of soldiers you get wounded or injured in the line of duty. The bureaucracy involved to do my job is astounding. With the Government ran VA (Veterans Administration) system being the worst and the MMSO (Military Medical Support Office) running a close second. I do not want to turn our healthcare system into anything resembling these organizations.
Did you even read the headline? Did you even watch the video? I guess not. The issue here is that Graham and other Republicans have been suggesting that we don't want gatekeepers, but we already have gatekeepers!
They are trying to scare us, and Cokie Roberts was trying to inject some sanity.
Then you came along and tried to inject an appeal to authority argument that rings hollow. You can't claim credibility when you come to this site. One earns it. You haven't.
To be more accurate, it's not an insurance agent: it's whatever high-school dropout is sitting in front of the computer on the day you have your heart attack.
A high-school dropout couldn't do the job. Screwing the public out of services they have paid for is a highly-skilled profession.
Absolutely. When an insurance company rigs their claims system to be so cumbersome, complicated and lengthy that the claimant is more prone to give up, they need knowledgeable people who can work that system to its most profitable potential.
I don't believe the people the doctor above is speaking to are really making any decisions. They are simply relaying info to that doctor based upon other higher-ups decisions about what is covered and what treatments are allowed or disallowed.
So, you are wrong again.
If the few remaining real "journalists" would do their friggin' jobs, we might get this done. As it is, the Republitoads are controlling the debate, as usual, and several moderate Democrats in Congress are running scared. Unless they regenerate their spines and unite behind some kind of meaningful reform, the robber barons running the Insurance Companies will win again.
We generally assume that health insurance is necessary to guard against severe financial risk in the event of illness or injury. That may be the case. We may each need a pooled financial resource to provide financial backup in these cases.
But why do we accept that someone else should make the decision where to place our healthcare dollars? A pooled financial resource does not require this. One could be given a maximum financial limit and left to allocate that resource as one sees fit.
Healthcare authorities, including the experts who drive the debates and all those whose reason for being seems to be to tell the rest of us what we need when it comes to healthcare, apparently assume that each of us cannot individually decide that ourselves.
The primary assumption behind our third-party system is that we would with knee-jerk certainty turn into medical care junkies, insatiably seeking doctor consultations, tests, surgeries and drugs to a degree that far exceeded actual need.
In a few cases where this assumption has been tested with scientific rigor, the results suggest otherwise. Quite resoundingly. Who wants to waste time or money in their doctor's office? Who really wants to go under the knife? Or take another pill? Several studies have shown that left to their own determination, patients choose to see physicians 20% less and consume 20% less in services, including procedures and drugs.
Sure, we have all seen in others and felt in ourselves the urge to seek more healthcare than we need. But the evidence suggests that we are actually as rational about healthcare consumption as we are in any other manner of consumption when given the chance to allocate our healthcare dollars according to our own perceptions of need.
And who knows better whether you are getting better than you?
Mr. News
But,don't stop there. Ask everyone you know to do the same. Watch the special, discuss the topics that come up, and send a message to the insurance/healthcare companies that their days of raping the wealth of this nation are at an end.
This Wednesday is their Armageddon.
“If some bureaucrat puts himself between you and your doctor, denying you exactly what you need, that’s a crisis.” page 1
“No Washington bureaucrat or healthcare lobbyist should stand between your family and your doctor”, page 13
“No Washington politician or bureaucrat should stand between you and your doctor.”, page 20
“Government should not stand between the patient and the physician.”, page 20
I will have a little more sympathy for the Insurance Companies when they stop paying their CEOs eight-figure salaries.
Leading health plan CEO paychecks
Ron Williams' total compensation for 2208: $24,300,112
Why should we believe that these people are any more sympathetic to an insurance claim than a government bureaucrat would be?
Am very much in agreement with the view that there would be little difference between having a government employee or an insurance company employee between my doctor and me. Either way it disrupts the relationship and the care.
I would like to have my doctor look at me as the guy who is paying him. The same as my lawyer, accountant, grocer or auto dealer. I would like to be the guy who the doc is supposed to make happy. Not the insurance company. And not the government.
Are you of the belief that insurance companies do not seek to maximize their financial gains by limiting losses? '...prove to me that any one of them (insurance companies) pays by claims denied.'