DailyKos has a must-read story about how a woman got (and was cured of) leukemia, and the lengths the insurance companies will go to in order to avoid paying for her care.
This is how it is explained to her by a social worker:
If you worked for a company that offered insurance, if you carried your family’s insurance, next year your insurer would slap a million dollar surcharge on the company policy for carrying a leukemia patient. The company would get the bill and someone in accounting would question “what is this extra million dollars we are being billed?”
The insurance company would explain to them that the million is for you, and it is yearly, but is, ahem, “fixable.” They will say “as long as she is on your insurance (wink, wink) this charge will be there. So what you have to ask yourself (more wink, wink) is whether this employee is worth a million dollar a year salary on top of what you are already paying her.”
Social worker said she had seen small business owners go almost broke trying to cover this charge, and had even heard of one who defiantly did go broke, throwing all of the employees out of work. But more usually, she said, they just fire you.
“Wait, wait!” say you, “Isn’t it illegal to fire someone for their health history? Suppose I’m all well and working?”
She looks at you with more pity, says yes, so of course they will have to find “cause” to fire you, which any employer can always do.
“But I am a very, very good employee!” you protest.
“Yes,” she says, “but they can always find some cause.” The real problem she goes on to explain, is that you will find a new job, that company’s insurer will slap them with the surcharge, they will take their turn at firing you, until you’ve been through six or seven jobs in a year, fired “for cause” from all of them, which of course looks very, very bad to a prospective employer.
“So in a year or so of this, you will not just be uninsurable, you will also be unemployable.”
This is what happens when health insurance is run as a for-profit business. Eventually, the insurance companies force you onto Medicaid, which means that the government picks up the tab for you anyway. So the taxpayers are already paying for socialized medicine (on top of paying for their expensive private health insurance, if they can get it).
9 Comments
Wow! I wonder how true this is.
I work for a small company with an employee who has had cancer, not once, but twice, in the past 12 years. Nothing even close to this has ever happened. And our premiums, while increasing at a fast clip most of the past 10 years, have never gone up more than 15% in an year. Yes, that’s too much, but not anywhere close to the horror stories I’ve heard.
I would have to see proof that this not only happened but is a frequent (or even semi-regular) event. I don’t like apocryphal stories, whether they be left wing or right wing, to “prove” a point.
This is not, by the way, meant to be a comment opposed to single payer or gov’t insurance. For me, the jury is still out on that.
I’m with Sammy on this one. I would like to see evidence that this is widespread.
At the same time, even if the kinds of actions described here are not common, I wouldn’t be surprised if certain insurance companies devise the kinds of perverse incentives that promote this kind of behavior.
I just read the story on DailyKos. My new opinion is that the story highlights the challenges with blogs. The author is not identified. None of the people in the story are identified. I have nothing to go on to judge the believability. I am now doubly with Sammy on this one. For those of us who want health care reform, this hurts the cause more than it helps.
So, will anyone (including the media) do the research to see if this is true or not?
With no names, places, company names, etc. it’s going to be hard to research. It really defeats the purpose to spread this kind of propaganda.
It’s kind of like those endlessly forwarded emails that perpetuate urban legends as fact.
It’s possible that this could be researched if the original author is willing to cooperate. But it won’t come out for weeks because real journalism takes time.
I just sent a comment to PBS’s NOW with the link and a suggestion that it could be a story. They are the only ones that I can think of that might follow through. At least that I trust. I don’t watch 20/20 or 60 Minutes or any of those shows anymore. Although I suppose something this salacious is right up their alley.
Sammy, you give up way too easily. I sent an email to PolitiFact.com, to see if they would look into it. What I want them to research is if health insurance companies do indeed slap big penalties on companies who have employees that need expensive medical treatment. That should be pretty easy to research.
Also, the author of this piece *is* identified. The article was crossposted to DailyKos, but at the bottom of the article is a link to the original post in the author’s blog (http://progressivefox.com). Click on the “About” page for that, and it identifies the article’s author as Lisa Bennett, and includes a bio and email address — and even her snail mail address.
Thanks Starluna — PBS NOW would be a good place as well. Another site that might want to look into it is FactCheck.org, but I’ve found them to sometimes slant things a little too much to the right, so I didn’t write to them. But I wouldn’t mind if someone did (I’m happy to see all sides of the issue).
If anyone gets any more information about this, please let me know.
Well, it looks like my laziness lit a fire under your ass. 😉
Actually, I didn’t want to “steal” time from my employer. And, well, I can’t afford to fall behind with a vacation looming. Plus, I need to work on preparing for a job search in case my company dies, which is a distinct possibility (bad economy coupled with owner w/ a spending problem, that one would think I, as a damn controller, could better get under control – see what I did there?).
And a little hard rock band I’m trying to keep on a stage every once in a while.
Sorry. Bio over.
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