Recent comments

Mr. Potter, I know it has become very popular to make disparaging remarks about health insurance plans. However, I find your comments to be unbalanced at best. Rarely, do we hear about the good deeds of a health plan such as the work of their diligent nurse case managers and disease management nurses who assist members in meeting their health care goals. This often involves helping members navigate through an often complex and confusing health care system. Members are often assisted with health care needs as they transition through levels of care, including home health care, durable medical equipment arrangements and specialty consultations. Quality departments of these maligned health plans, spend much time and money on member health initiatives promoting preventive screenings, monitoring the quality of care of practitioners and health delivery organizations, credentialing practitioners, along with collecting their member's opinions about health plan performance, just to name a few. And in response to your chills, health plans not only monitor over-utilization of services, such as ER visits but, also under-utilization of services. The cost of health care is increasing every year and many preventable medical errors continue to occur, costing patients and their families dearly in setbacks to recovery and additional anguish, sometimes resulting in death. The cost of these errors is astronomical. I for one, believe that healthcare reform is going to need all parties at the table for a solution. One final note: I had a very good friend a few years ago who found herself in an untenable situation. After working a good portion of her lifetime as legal secretary, she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and breast cancer. She became disabled due to the progression of her disease. She eventually was going to lose her health plan (this plan by the way, covered her after her COBRA coverage should have ended) She had already lost her home having to move in with a family member. She applied for Social Security Disability and was immediately denied. I am told this is common when applying for SS disability. However, being a legal secretary, she was meticulous with her paperwork and kept copies of the paperwork each time she applied and carefully organized these documents for those who would be required to review them. To her frustration, she was required to send in her meticulous documentation (which included her medical records) on three different occasions because someone with Social Security had misplaced them. Finally, after her long struggle, she was approved about two weeks before she died. I can't help but wonder if this is the kind of thing we can look forward to with a public health plan. I sure hope not. Some documents to back up a few of my statements here: http://www.iom.edu/Object.File/Master/4/117/ToErr-8pager.pdf http://www.commonwealthfund.org/Content/Publications/In-the-Literature/2005/May/Five-Years-After--To-Err-Is-Human---What-Have-We-Learned.aspx http://www.ncqa.org/