Health insurer tied bonuses to dropping sick policyholders
Link: Health insurer tied bonuses to dropping sick policyholders
"The documents show that in 2002, the company’s goal for Barbara Fowler, Health Net’s senior analyst in charge of rescission reviews, was 15 cancellations a month. She exceeded that, rescinding 275 policies that year — a monthly average of 22.9."
Excellent L.A. Times investigative piece describing how HealthNet assigned its analysts quotas for how many sick people to deny health coverage to, and paid them bonuses for hitting those quotas.
The next time someone comes up with an idea for expanding health care and it gets shouted down with McCarthy-era bogeyman phrases like "socialized medicine," remember that capitalized medicine is what we have now. Denying health insurance to cancer patients and poor children is what capitalized medicine is all about.
Not an excellent report in the Times. A biased report and most of the plagarists who have followed haven’t followed what is still going on in the proceedings. The company has a policy for withdrawing policies but reviews are written by supervisors. The language is regrettable but numbers you won’t see are the numbers of polices and apps reviewed to get those numbers. Bush trys to hurt thousands of kids in his veto but Healthnet and Barbara Fowler get more personal attacks. The Times reporter is looking for headlines to further her own interests as are the bureacrats and politicians not wanting any of us to demand changes that matter.
So you’re saying that what’s going on here is okay because the Health Net analyst was just following orders?
That’s swell.