Beginning of the End for Major Health Insurers

[Jackpine Radical]

9. I will add that they cost the healthcare system even more than is apparent

from the obvious numbers. Every provider has to hire people to fight the insurance companies in order to get their payments. I'm very familiar with the situation in small outpatient mental health clinics, where we had to have a full-time person to request authorizations for treatment, file claims & fight the insurance companies' denials (often after having authorized a treatment). Our billing people would often spend upwards of an hour on hold while the people on the other end went to lunch or something. They were always making "mistakes" in payments, always in their favor, hoping we would eventually give up in pursuing the remainder of what we were due. The therapists themselves would often spend long periods on the phone arguing for the medical necessity of a given procedure for a patient, while the medically unqualified person on the other end just wouldn't "get it." The whole business was so frustrating and maddening that I gave up on health care several years ago and developed a strictly forensic practice, in which the courts value my expertise & pay for it without hassle.