Health Insurance Parity And Slime

On Saturday, the New York Times' editorial page called for passage of insurance parity for mental health by Congress. The paper favors the Senate version. I suspect the Senate version will end up getting the nod over the House bill. President Bush will sign it into law.

I don't know all the details of the bill but I suspect, as is common with these things, that it will be phased in over time. Meaning that insurance companies will be free to screw over patients in the meantime. No sense taking away their favorite hobby too quickly, eh?

In an article in today's Times, it is revealed that some long-term care insurers are denying payments owed to the elderly:

"In depositions and interviews, current and former employees at Conseco, Bankers Life and Penn Treaty described business practices that denied or delayed policyholders’ claims for seemingly trivial reasons. Employees said they had been prohibited from making phone calls to policyholders and that claims had been abandoned without informing policyholders. Such tactics, advocates for the elderly say, are becoming common throughout the industry.

“These companies have essentially turned their bureaucracies into profit centers,” said Glenn R. Kantor, a California lawyer who has represented policyholders.

Yet these concerns have been ignored by state regulators, advocates say, and have gone unnoticed by federal lawmakers who recently passed incentives intended to promote purchases of long-term-care policies, in the hopes of forestalling a Medicare funding crisis.

Conseco and Bankers Life “made it so hard to make a claim that people either died or gave up,” said Betty J. Hobel, a former Bankers Life agent in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

“When someone is 70 or 80 years old,” she said, “how many times are they going to try before they just give up?”

The insurance business is as slimy as used care sales or Big Pharma. I encourage you all to read the article.