dump the sick?
“…for twenty years I worked as a senior executive at health insurance companies. And I saw how they confused their customers and dumped the sick, so all they—so also they can satisfy their Wall Street investors.”
—Interview with Wendell Potter, former head of corporate communications at CIGNA, on Democracy Now! July 16th, 2009
- Insurance companies ration care by dumping the sick. Not everybody gets care who has insurance, as insurance companies do all that they can to avoid making payments on claims. They want the premiums, but don’t want to pay out when people are sick. They are willing and able to Dump the Sick to ensure they make the most money they can.
- Health care provided by insurance companies is more wasteful than most universal insurance systems – private health does not mean efficient health. Insurance companies are filled with bureaucrats who skim off the top. The U.S. healthcare system uses up 16% of the wealth of the country as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By comparison, the Canadian universal, ’socialized’ health system uses up 10% of the Canadian GDP. A large chunk of your health care dollar is not going for health care when you must buy from insurance companies, it is going to profit, bureaucracy and the corporate good life.
- Insurance companies make life and death decisions and are accountable only to profit, not to you.
The two different ways that insurance companies ‘Dump the Sick’…
1.Rescinding your policy as an individual insurance holder….
“when insurance companies who are active in the individual market—and this means when you don’t get your insurance coverage through your workplace, about the only option you have is to buy it directly from an insurance company, and usually it’s much more costly than it is through—if you buy it or get it through your employer. Once you file a claim, if you are unfortunate enough to get very sick or have an accident and file a claim, you very often will find that your insurance company will go back and look at your application to see if there might be a chance that you either didn’t disclose something that you knew about in the past or inadvertently didn’t disclose something or might not have known about a pre-existing condition. They’ll use that as evidence that you were committing fraud, and they’ll revoke your policy, or they call it “rescinding” your policy, leaving you holding the bag, making you completely responsible for all the medical bills. That’s one way that they dump people who need insurance the most.”
2. Jacking up workplace insurance rates…
“if you are employed, particularly with a small business, and your insurance—your employer gets his or her insurance through one of the large insurers, and if just one person in your company files a claim that the underwriters think is too high, if it skews what they think is the appropriate medical experience or claim experience, when that business comes up for renewal, they very likely will jack up the rates so much that your employer has no alternative but to leave and leave you and all of your coworkers without insurance. Either that or they may cut benefits or try to shop for coverage somewhere else. But the end result is, you may find yourself dumped into the rolls and the ranks of the uninsured.”
—Wendell Potter (Democracy Now! July 16th, 2009)
