When you vote this November, do some research on how much money your representative(s) received from publicly traded health insurance companies.
In all the debate about Health Care Reform in the United States, one major issue seems to have escaped careful scrutiny – the continued financial abuses of the private for-profit Health Care Insurance companies. What does it mean to be a “for profit” Health Insurance Company? It means that such companies are businesses that are working to maximize profit, like any business. Obviously, in a business whose costs are represented by either paying their own employees, or paying out insurance claims to their customers, for-profit Insurance companies will be tempted to minimize service to their actual customers in order to both increase payments to their own employees, and especially to their stock-holders.
In a recent Newswire special investigative report, “Dying to Make a Profit” (http://newswire.net/download.php ), Chris Ryan and Charles St. Onge write that this “divided loyalty” of for-profit Health Insurance companies is an issue that continues to have a corrupting influence in the medical insurance business in America, and their arguments are so convincing that they would send almost every American to their desks to type out a letter to their congressman – and it will likely be an angry letter. In short, the report makes clear that publicly traded medical insurers in the United States have demonstrated ever increasing levels of deceit in attempting to reduce their actual insurance payments so that they can provide ever greater returns to their stock holders.
For profit publicly traded health insurance companies have been caught practicing a variety of policies clearly designed to deny as many services as possible to their customers, including denials of service for even the most inconsequential mistakes in paperwork. Further, until courts began to tighten rules to force companies to actually deliver on their promises of service, many for-profit insurance companies argued that they were protected from the legal challenges of their own customers.
The response? Many companies have made the processes of challenging insurance denials very complex in hopes of exhausting their own customers and discouraging them from exercising their legal rights. Today, it is routine for medical insurance companies to make virtually any inquiry about service either by phone or internet so complex that patients will be actually confused or discouraged from benefitting from their own coverage. The profit incentive in the medical insurance industry quite simply acts as a deterrent to providing efficient coverage, in hopes of improving the profit statements and financial reports at the annual stock holders meetings.
It is clear that the for-profit medical insurance industry is unwilling to regulate its’ own abuses, and recent legal battles reveal that insurance companies will only respond when courts, or Congress, forces them to act in their customers best interests. It is time to bring Congress back into this battle – because the health of the American people – and the health of the actual customers of the insurance companies themselves – is clearly at risk. Doctors have taken an oath to “do no harm”. American medical insurance companies, it is all too obvious, have taken no such oath.
Newswire, a subsidiary of Extensions, Inc. www.ext.com (Symbol:EXTI) intends to consolidate the fragmented independent journalism market by giving writers a unified platform and access to leverage our technology in converting their content and press releases into search engine optimized (SEO) traffic. Our platform allows writers the ability to be directly hired by third parties to write stories and distribute press releases. As our community grows so will our distribution thus giving our community the ability of earning an income as a writer and not as a commodity. To learn more on how you can become part of the Newswire community please visit www.newswire.net .