More reason not to vote for GOP leadership. They have simply been asleep at the wheel since 1994, at least. In looking up bits on the ever rising co-pays for "managed care" that was supposed to provide full access once you bought into an HMO, I found this:
What is one way to take an ordinary insurance income stream and accelerate it? Well, you start raising co-pays to drive down "loss-ratios" and/or use "pre-approval", etc., to make utilization onerous or risky. Follow this up by putting serious caps on the plan and exclude or limit as much treatment as you can, either upfront or with fallback-refusal, fraud-net "questionnaires", while still claiming to provide "coverage".
The result: booming earnings, a soaring stock price, and possibly a huge non-cash CEO payout.
Anyway, here is how one person put it on the B-P blog:
So far in this discussion we have not talked about the declining coverage in available private insurance plans. This is a huge problem as well. Over the last decade my dental plans went from 90% payout to "60% of usual and customary for approved procedures only." The list of exclusions on my health plans quadrupled in size. Deductables rose, EVERY name brand drug was taken off the formulary (even when there was no generic), and my coworkers started to have increased trouble with denial of claims. Over this same period premiums more than tripled.
This is yet another reason why simply compelling private insurance will not solve the problem. Absent government regulation of coverage and costs, quality of insurance will continue to decline until the effect of buying insurance is identical to donating money to the insurance corporations.
That's pretty much the book on Romney-care and other ideas that fall short of the much needed single-payer system.
What this doesn't cover (and something Michael Moore leaves out of sicko), is that people have very little way of tracking how their insurance is being reduced. Few really know what their Nanny-Corporation is doing behind the curtain year-to-year ...
DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU ARE CO-PAYING FOR?
Have you ever gotten complete listings of what is covered, each year when you enroll (if you are lucky enough to) or are you asked to "Call us, and we'll tell you"?
Have you ever heard of companies providing complete details to prospective applications or much more than, "Yes, we provide 'full' medical and dental."?
THE MYSTERIOUS AND UNSEEN 'CHIEF MEDICAL REVIEW DOCTORS' AND "THE PLAN BOARD"
Here's another one (and an item for someone who wants to do serious healthcare reform advocacy): Have you ever tried to find out the names of the people who are responsible for determining if your claim is paid or denied?
It's never published in any materials you ever get as part of standard issue. that I've seen or heard.
You can request it. Boy, is that a bad idea. About ten years ago, I put in a phone call to ask for the list (I believe you might be entitled to this disclosure by law), on not much more than a whim, just to see who the Who's Who was. Was I ever persona non-grata. I got "20 questions" on the phone, most of them hostile. At the end, I would have bet that my name got put on a watch list of people looking to sue the company or something. All I wanted to do was to see who was running my health care - I really had NO other agenda.
