What is wrong with the people who run insurance companies? Is there some new kind of crack on the streets that I don’t know about? There must be, because the people who populate these insurance companies must be high.
My physicians work really, really, hard. My insurance is supposedly the top of the line PPO. When my physicians bill them $100.00 for a hospital visit, my insurance says we’ll only pay $50.00 because that’s all its worth. Where did they get their medical degree? They don’t know me. You let them come and deal with me in the hospital, and see what they get. They’d bill a $1.000.00. I’m not an easy patient to deal with (festive, and fabulous) but I have issues. That aside, where’s the logic in this? You go to 7-11 and buy a soda that cost a dollar, and give them 50 cents and say, “that’s all its worth” and walk out the door, and see what you get.
I developed a mass on my leg. I desperately needed an MRI. I was too large to fit in the MRI machine at the hospital. I tried the zoo, the racetrack, everywhere. Finally, I ended up on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, after losing 200 pounds to fit in the MRI. Do you know what the insurance company did? They denied my MRI because I hadn’t had an X-ray. I hadn’t looked at it with a magnifying glass either, and that would have been just as useful as an X-Ray. They were ready to waste money on an unnecessary procedure, just to follow an arbitrary protocol obviously handed down from someone who must be on this new drug I don’t know about. So, I had to go get an override.
Come to find out there is a company, (in Arizona of course), that does NOTHING but handle complaints about denied approval. My insurance company is denying so many claims that they need an outside company to handle the fallout. Yes, they are—and it’s a huge phone bank—there’s hundreds of people working there. When I called up I said, “I’m Dr. Gordon, my policy is through the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine…” The woman’s response was, “Is UCLA in Arizona or California?” I said, “is there a University of Central Lower Arizona?” She said, I just need to know where you are, because we handle California, and our Texas Office handles Arizona. This is the problem—people going to work, and leaving their brains at home on the bathroom counter. It has been so long since this woman had made a definitive decision, if you told her to make up her mind, she’d powder her forehead.
Insurance companies, hire lazy thinking, unmotivated people, and encourage those qualities in them, so that upper management can perpetrate greed-driven atrocities on the people—sadly that has become the American way. Baby’s boomers are getting old, most of us are back from Woodstock now, and guess what—our bodies are as broken down as Wavy Gravy’s Love Van. There are problems in health care, lots of bad physicians, nurses, and lab technicians, lots of waste, lots of graft. Lots of people misuse the system, because they’re unethical or they’re just too poor, and it is the lesser of the evils. All of this feeds into it. At what point do we stop and say enough?
I have had to spend hour, upon hour, on the telephone, arguing with my insurance company to get them to pay my physicians. This is outrageous! My physicians provide much more service than they bill for… and my insurance company has the nerve to send me tons on letters, questioning every little procedure. “Your physician billed such and such, did you receive that service?” Get real. Right, my physicians gave up the last years of teenage lust, and most of their 20’s to go to college, then medical school, complete residency, to become physicians, to try and defraud Rude-Cross & Wayward Shield Insurance out of $150.00. The insurance companies know better than this. They’re just hoping that I don’t respond, so they can use that as an excuse not to pay, or to delay payment. This is outrageous. The wasted paper alone is egregious. Don’t the people who run insurance companies realize that they live on earth, and an organism can be no healthier than its environment? My friend Alex, summed it up, he said, either people are honest and ethical or they are not. That’s the bottom line. Dishonest and unethical people have seized custody of the vital industries in America. What are we going to do about it? Holla back chirren!
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