Company threatens to pull woman's health coverage over 1 cent

[Councilman]

I find this to be over the top but typical of some insurance companies. What they don't seem to understand is they are playing into the plans of Obama to do away with private insurance and replace it all with his Socialist Gov. plan.

YouTube - SHOCK UNCOVERED: Obama IN HIS OWN WORDS saying His Health Care Plan will ELIMINATE private insurance

With the right votes in Nov. we can get this Obama plan over turned, before it and Cap and Trade bankrupt the Nation.


http://http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_15456976?source=pop

La Rosa Carrington has more than enough to worry about. She's a single mother with two teenage daughters, she's fighting a type of leukemia that requires five days of chemo a month for four months, and she lost her job in May.

So the last thing she needed was news that her health insurance benefits would be terminated because she hadn't paid her premium in full. The shortfall? One penny.

"My medical bills are coming in like locusts, and you're holding up my benefits because of one red cent?" an incredulous Carrington said from her hospital bed last week as she recalled her conversation with a customer service rep at Discovery Benefits, an employee benefits administrator based in North Dakota.

 

[Deuce]

If your goal is to paint government healthcare as a scary thing that needs to be stopped, you're doing it wrong.

Also I've seen most of the speeches that are in that youtube video and they cleverly edit out a lot of stuff. Despicable.

edit: Oh, and there's also that little issue where the LIBERAL DEM SUPERMAJORITY OF DOOM couldn't even be arsed to pass a Public Option (oh god, we can't let those poor insurance megacorporations get competition!), and you really think Single Payer is remotely close to being on the table?

 

[donsutherland1]

Anyone can make an error. The appropriate measure would have been for the company to ask for the error to be fixed and to give the woman sufficient time to do so. Instead, it has decided to pursue a course that would inflict irreparable harm on her. The company should be held liable for its extreme action by the appropriate regulatory authorities i.e., made to immediately reinstate the woman's coverage, honor its obligations with respect to her medical costs, and to pay a significant fine.

 

[Deuce]

Profit motive is a tricky thing when it comes to health insurance. In normal business operations, profit motive drives a company to charge as much as they can while reducing costs as much as possible. That's how business works, it drives companies to be more efficient. Usually that's a good thing. The problem with reducing costs in health insurance is that those costs are medical bills received by the insured. Insurance companies have a financial incentive to not pay your claim and to drop policies of patients with serious or long-term illnesses. It doesn't make them evil, it just makes them a business. The effect of this behavior, however, is situations like this one.

It bothers me on a moral level to have profit motives involved in what can literally be life or death. :/

This isn't to say that for-profit insurance can't work, it just needs more strict scrutiny and regulation than, say, making televisions. Nobody dies if Sony makes a crappy, defective television.

 

[Phoenix]

the article states that the problem was taken care of and she didn't lose her coverage.

 

[rivrrat]

That **** is automated. The computer doesn't know or care how much is delinquent, only that it's delinquent.

 

[Dittohead not!]

It's official:

The health care reform debate has produced enough organic fertilizer for every garden in America.

We're going green for sure.

 

[Deuce]

the article states that the problem was taken care of and she didn't lose her coverage.

Only after media attention was threatened, but yes.

That **** is automated. The computer doesn't know or care how much is delinquent, only that it's delinquent.

The customer service person who was arguing with the patient over the one penny wasn't a computer.

 

[ludahai]

The customer service person who was arguing with the patient over the one penny wasn't a computer.

Those customer service reps are generally automatons with little education and not one modicum of common sense... or they are college students working at a call center... or heck, more and more are people working in a call center sweatship in Kolkata or Mumbai...

 

[Deuce]

Those customer service reps are generally automatons with little education and not one modicum of common sense... or they are college students working at a call center... or heck, more and more are people working in a call center sweatship in Kolkata or Mumbai...

More of a robot than a computer

 

[LaMidRighter]

Those customer service reps are generally automatons with little education and not one modicum of common sense... or they are college students working at a call center... or heck, more and more are people working in a call center sweatship in Kolkata or Mumbai...

Yup, I have to deal with those idiots every once in awhile on behalf of a client and they are hopelessly lost and uncaring because they get paid whether my client retains coverage or not. They are infuriatingly stupid at times.

 

[ludahai]

And according to the article, she rounded the fraction of a cent correctly. It is bad enough when these automatons don't know basic rounding rules any third grader should know, but at least the computers should be properly programmed to round unwhole numbers.

Really dumb, to be honest.

 

[peepnklown]

A penny, a freaking penny!? RIOT! :mrgreen:

 

[ludahai]

A penny, a freaking penny!? RIOT! :mrgreen:

It was actually .45 cents. Under the rules of mathematics, she was right. Is this company trying to make Obama's point for him?