The Health Care Racket: PAUL KRUGMAN ; Dick CheneyÂ’s Dangerous Son-in-Law by PAUL KRUGMAN: The New York Times Friday Feb 16th, 2007 6:58 AM KRUGMAN: In our health insurance system, resources that could have been used to pay for medical care are instead wasted in a zero-sum struggle over who ends up with the bill.
THE COMPLETE ARTICLE AND MORE --> OP-ED COLUMNIST The Health Care Racket By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: February 16, 2007 Is the health insurance business a racket? Yes, literally — or so say two New York hospitals, which have filed a racketeering lawsuit against UnitedHealth Group and several of its affiliates. I don’t know how the case will turn out. But whatever happens in court, the lawsuit illustrates perfectly the dysfunctional nature of our health insurance system, a system in which resources that could have been used to pay for medical care are instead wasted in a zero-sum struggle over who ends up with the bill. The two hospitals accuse UnitedHealth of operating a “rogue business plan” designed to avoid paying clients’ medical bills. For example, the suit alleges that patients were falsely told that Flushing Hospital was “not a network provider” so UnitedHealth did not pay the full network rate. UnitedHealth has already settled charges of misleading clients about providers’ status brought by New York’s attorney general: the company paid restitution to plan members, while attributing the problem to computer errors. The legal outcome will presumably turn on whether there was deception as well as denial — on whether it can be proved that UnitedHealth deliberately misled plan members. But it’s a fact that insurers spend a lot of money looking for ways to reject insurance claims. And health care providers, in turn, spend billions on “denial management,” employing specialist firms — including Ingenix, a subsidiary of, yes, UnitedHealth — to fight the insurers. So it’s an arms race between insurers, who deploy software and manpower trying to find claims they can reject, and doctors and hospitals, who deploy their own forces in an effort to outsmart or challenge the insurers. And the cost of this arms race ends up being borne by the public, in the form of higher health care prices and higher insurance premiums. --MORE-- http://mparent7777.blogspot.com/2007/02/health-care-racket-paul-krugman.html Labels: crime, health care, health insurance, PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times 31 to stand trial in CIA kidnapping case http://mparent7777.blogspot.com/2007/02/31-to-stand-trial-in-cia-kidnapping.html "Media fall for pro-Israel hate group's "Terror Free Oil"" http://tinyurl.com/2vpcek "Is "Terror-Free Oil" Really Snake Oil?" http://tinyurl.com/2wak8x Dick Cheney’s Dangerous Son-in-Law http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2007/02/dick-cheneys-dangerous-son-in-law.html And More http://mparent7777.blogspot.com/ New website http://mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/ Alternate website with unique articles CRIMES AND CORRUPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER NEWS MARC PARENT mparent7777 mparent --------------------------------- The best gets better. See why everyone is raving about the All-new Yahoo! Mail.
