Insurance Industry Myths About the Uninsured

[cornermouse]

http://wendellpotter.com/2012/06/insuran...uninsured/

Insurers falsely claimed young people were uninsured by choice, don’t believe it.

In 2007, a few months before I left the health insurance industry, I was tasked to write a “white paper” designed to help convince media folks and politicians that the problem of the uninsured wasn’t much of a problem after all. If demographic data was sliced just so, I was expected to write, it was easy to conclude that many of the uninsured — some 46 million at the time — were that way by choice.

I was told to point out, for example, that a significant percentage of people without coverage were in families with annual incomes of $75,000 or more. The implication: That those folks were simply shirking their responsibilities. A crucial fact that I was not to disclose, of course, was that many Americans, including wealthy ones, couldn’t buy coverage at any price because of pre-existing conditions. These are the “untouchables” as far as insurance companies were concerned. (That’s my term, not the industry’s. The underwriters prefer the term “uninsurable.”)...

[TheCrone]

Those bastards really want to slant it their way for maximum profits, don't they?


I know back when I was facing the ripe old age of 47, (now it seems like that is just when life starts) I was told by three big insurers that I would have to pay $ 650 a month for coverage. That wouldn't have been so bad - but they all wanted to exclude from coverage:

1) my spinal column, slightly injured in an accident in 1978
2) my reproductive organs (I had "pre-cancerous" lesions in one or two places, and have had those since I was eighteen.)
3) my skin (as someone who helped with a research project in the mid 1980's, I had been biopsied on my elbows, with flaps of skin put in a data bank of skin cells at Stanford University. Ever since then, insurers treat me as though the biopsy was for cancer, even though it was not.)

A friend said to me, "It almost seems like you'd be better off just getting dental insurance, as there really is not much coverage you'd get from a health insurer."

[c387]

(06-11-2012 06:14 PM)cornermouse Wrote:  http://wendellpotter.com/2012/06/insuran...uninsured/

Insurers falsely claimed young people were uninsured by choice, don’t believe it.

In 2007, a few months before I left the health insurance industry, I was tasked to write a “white paper” designed to help convince media folks and politicians that the problem of the uninsured wasn’t much of a problem after all. If demographic data was sliced just so, I was expected to write, it was easy to conclude that many of the uninsured — some 46 million at the time — were that way by choice.

I was told to point out, for example, that a significant percentage of people without coverage were in families with annual incomes of $75,000 or more. The implication: That those folks were simply shirking their responsibilities. A crucial fact that I was not to disclose, of course, was that many Americans, including wealthy ones, couldn’t buy coverage at any price because of pre-existing conditions. These are the “untouchables” as far as insurance companies were concerned. (That’s my term, not the industry’s. The underwriters prefer the term “uninsurable.”)...

This is why we need single-payer health care. The for-profit insurance leaches need to be out of the picture.

[Borneo]

They are nothing but parasites! There is no reason to have for profit insurance companies at all! Corporation are always telling us workers that we've been made "redundant" or "Obsolete" and that we need to get retrained for the "New Economy". It's time we told Cigna they are obsolete, and they need retraining in a new business. As Ted Knight says "The world needs ditch diggers too!"

Imagine if all these insurance predators changed their businesses into making solar panels, lithium electric car batteries, light rail construction and wind turbines, or even designing the next Blackberry or ipad! You know, something we can use!

[Enthusiast]

You all already know this stuff but I'll say it again until I'm blue in the face.

U.S. health insurance companies do not contribute anything to health care. They are only a PARASITIC middle man taking a cut of "FREE MONEY".

Western European health care systems are far cheaper than the U.S. model. And they are more effective. The French health care system is the most expensive yet it comes in at less than 2/3s of the cost of that of the U.S.

The reason for this is profit. In the U.S. everyone along the line takes a profit cut. The health care service providers have to make a profit just as the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies.

This costs all of us. For one thing care is rationed to save profits for the insurance industry. And care is denied by the insurance industry.

This is why we desperately needed a strong public option in the new health care legislation. We needed a public option that could evolve into a system that did not include a parasitic insurance industry or a for-profit health care services providers.

Before this can happen we have to remove money from elections and the legislative process. Well, you already know what we are up against.