2008 - Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC)

G o v e r n m e n t
time comes, everyone else pays for you. The problem is that
the health insurance companies aren’t doing what they were
intended to do, or what we thought they would do. They aren’t
looking out for you at all. They are looking out for themselves
and their bottom line: profit. And that means denying you
coverage when you become ill and dropping you from the policy.
Then later on they deny your application for coverage because
your medical history shows that you’ve been sick before and
you are a risk to them because you may get sick again. Health
insurance employees are required to deny a certain percentage
of a customer’s coverage for a claim. According to Dr. Linda
Pinot’s account while working for Humana, doctors with a higher
percentage of denials get a bonus. She was told when she
started working for the company that she had to give a 10%
denial rate. Payment for a claim is referred to as a medical loss.
Another problem with HMOs is that many people don’t work for
a large company with a group policy. They have to get their own
individual policy with excessive premiums, high deductibles,
and extremely limited coverage. Many of those individuals can’t
afford it and therefore don’t have insurance at all.
So if you look at the idea of how HMOs function best for
people, those that are able to be on a group policy, and you look
at the idea of universal health care, you will see that the ideas are
basically the same. There are two crucial differences: universal
health care will not exist to make a profit; it is to help everyone
that needs medical attention. Also, rather than having to work
for one of the large companies that is capable of having group
policies, it won’t matter where you work because everyone can
buy into one big one, the United States of America group policy.
Once the private health insurance companies are eliminated and
the profit factor is discarded, that money can be put into doing
what it should be doing: paying for health care.
This is a great battle to be fought. The health care industries
have bought off our Congress members with campaign
contributions. There are four times as many health care
lobbyists as there are Congress members. This has allowed a
bill to be passed allowing pharmaceutical companies to charge
whatever they want and $800 billion of taxpayer money has
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W r i t i n g A c r o s s t h e C u r r i c u l u m