Here is a little bit of news that the mainstream media is unlikely to pick up on, especially on the same day the White House welcomed “doctors from across the United States to the White House to share their unique perspective on the struggles that American families face every day when it comes to health care.” The fact that the one hundred and fifty invite-only attendees belonged to Doctors for America, formerly Doctors for Obama, is beside the point and best left unmentioned.
In any event, Beverly Gossage, a Research Fellow for the Show-Me Institute based out of Missouri and founder of HSA Benefits Consulting, did some independent research to determine which health care insurance provider had the largest denial rate. What she ultimately found was truly shocking.
Her answer came on the fifth page of the sixteen-page document called the 2008 National Health Insurer Report Card published by the American Medical Association (AMA). Found on the page was a chart (featured below) that contrasted the percentage of denied claims of Medicare with those of private insurers, such as Aetna, Anthem, CIGNA, Coventry, and Humana, among others.
Would you believe the denial rate for Medicare was nearly double that of the average percentage of denied claims for all the private insurance companies combined? Yep, out of the 6,938,431 claims Medicare received between March 1st, 2007 and March 10th, 2008, 475, 566 of them, or 6.85% of requests, were rejected. Compare this to UHC, which had the largest number of requests (1,127,691) out of the seven private health insurance companies, who had a denial rate of 2.68% within that same time frame.
What makes a little bit more unsettling is that AMA, who produced this report showing Medicare’s denial rate far above any private insurer, endorsed President Obama’s public-option monstrosity. With these facts in mind, do we really want our medical decisions, many of them likely to determine whether we live or die, in the hands of politicians and big government?
Tags: Aetna, AMA, American Medical Association, Anthem, Beverly Gossage, Big Government, CIGNA, Coventry, Doctors for America, Doctors for Obama, Health Net, HSA Benefits Consulting, Humana, Medicare, Show-Me Institute, UHC, white house
