06.25.09
All Angels Go to Heaven…
First We Kill All the Insurance Companies…
Health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers themselves should have paid, according to a report released yesterday by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.
At a committee hearing yesterday, three health-care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell “junk” policies that do not cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring “why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies.”
Many Americans pay higher premiums for the freedom to go outside an insurer’s network of doctors and hospitals. When they do, insurers typically pay a percentage of what they call the “usual and customary” rates for the services. How insurers determine the usual rates had long been opaque to consumers and difficult if not impossible for them to challenge.
As it turns out, insurers typically used numbers from Ingenix, a wholly owned subsidiary of the big insurer UnitedHealth Group. Ingenix had an incentive to produce benchmarks that low-balled usual and customary rates and shifted costs from insurers to their customers, the report said.
Ingenix got its data from the same insurers that bought its benchmark information, the report said. Insurers that contributed information to Ingenix often “scrubbed” their data to remove high charges, and Ingenix further manipulated the numbers, removing valid high charges from its calculations, the report said.
This is why any congressman who defends insurance companies as useful or competitive are evil lying assholes..am I being too subtle? Why do our “elected representatives” continue to allow them to rob Americans? Why?
06.24.09
Iran- Cry Havoc!!! The apparent perils of letting the general public wander around unleashed and un-licensed…
It is becoming all too clear to the Repugnican Party (and Fix’d Noise) that allowing the general public to wander around freely expressing their opinion can be detrimental; not only to Party loyalty, but to political power in general. Even Diane Feinstein who enjoys a certain Democratic cachet seems to be having doubts about giving the public even the shortest shrift these days…
The “party faithfull”, those willing to keep repeating the party line at ever increasing volume unil everyone with a brain and factual information get annoyed or bored or discouraged enough to just go away…well, they have basically decided to just stop listening. The increasingly crazy attacks (SSocialistts, Communists, Obama is scary, Be Afraid, Be very afraid…)