Didn't Obama talk about comparison charts? Comparing one company to another is not just about price. Clearly Medicare and Aetna would fail while UHC would be the prize winner.

So what is UHC doing right that the others are not.

Like every accountant knows, liars figure, but figures don't lie.  The question is, what is the strategy to get this in front of the state run media so they can't miss seeing it.  I know you have to cattle prod the hell out of them to get any action, but even they can't be too blind to see this.  Then again. 

Folks, you have a couple of weeks until the congress gets done fiddling with various versions of the healthcare bill and then we all suffer the consequences.  Please write, call, and/or e-mail your elected representatives and tell them to vote NO on obamacare.

Remember, obamacare will make you sick; it may even kill you!

My wife works for a company that handles Medicare Part B and C for nursing homes.  She has a job because dealing with Medicare is the most frustrating and illogical situation any business can ever find itself in.  She has even got so frustrated that she called a Medicare Supervisor the "B" word on the phone... and she was in the right.  These people appear to be trained to deny and delay payment of claims as much as possible... people really can't be as stupid as they appear to be.

Government run healthcare will really be a jobs package.  People will pay good money to avoid having to deal with idiots.

Beauxdog 

"See me... feel me... touch me... heal me..." Tommy - The Who (or is it BHO?) 

"Listening to you, I get the music. Gazing at you, I get the heat. Following you, I climb the mountains. I get excitement at your feet." Tommy - The Who (or is it the MSM?)

fab find!

I can't wait to write this up! I love this site.

Medicare is beginning to expand a program of retroactive audits to recover fairly provided and paid for Dr. services. They want money back from yrs ago and couch it under the mantle of "fraud". To them, fraud is if a provider forgets to check some insignificant box on a form the IRS can't even figure out. This will further disgust Dr's and cause even more to quit practice. People have no idea the pressure under which the health care system is operating, and it is starting to crack because Obama wants it to crack, and fail to establish a new Castro like "health service" with coerced Dr's working at the control and pleasure of the Government.

It's not just that the largest percentage of denials came from Medicare, but the even more glaring number in my view is that of 574,591 total denials, 475,566 were from medicare! That's nearly 83% of all denials of service requested in the US through the major insurers from March 2007 to March 2008.

Additionally, of the 475k records with denial codes, 79,006 contained the N115 and/or the M25 denial code. The N115 code denies service based on the findings from a Local Medical Review Policy (LMRP) or Local Coverage Determination (LCD). The M25 code is denial based on substantiated need for service. These couldn't be considered....rationing, could they?

First, I'm no fan of Medicare, but you're misrepresenting the facts here, and it does our side no good when we get nailed on an error such as this:

"The Medicare denial rate found in the study was roughly double that of all of the private carriers combined."

Correct me if I'm missing something here, but the rate of denials was 6.85%, about equal to Aetna's rate, and yes, considerably higher than most, and more than double the rate of some, but your statement doesn't hold water.  You can't combine rates as I think you're doing here.

Medicare and other insurance is not a big problem for elites and they believe rightly or not that good doctors and hospitals will always be available to them.

Remember, Fidel Castro was at death's door until the regime had a doctor from Spain fly to Cuba to treat the Great One.  Fidel got the best of the best Cuban medicine but past the clinic level it stinks -- then again it's only for the masses.

You and I are the "masses" folks.

Get rid of all the elected elites in the next election and that means those of you in Massachusetts and Maine and California too unless the Museum of Modern Pork down the street is too important to you.

 and those in the controlling elite know this and also know they can go to Spain, Switzerland or elsewhere or have good care brought to them.

As someone who has worked on both sides of the coin (medical provider of durable medical equipment and health insurance administrator) I wonder if they included in their figures the claims denied due to mistakes? Unscientifically, I would say that in both jobs, the claims that came across my desk that were denied due to mistakes in coding, diagnosis, even billed to the wrong insurance company were about 4 out of every 10. Medicare is a nightmare to bill and collect. As for mistakes on private insurance claims, when I found a simple mistake, for example, a doctor billing a flu shot under the wrong diagnosis, a simple call from me to the provider office to correct the error would have been more efficient than denying the claim. Federal law prohibited me from doing that. Instead, the claim is denied, and most likely, the doctor sent the insured the full bill since they probably don't hire specialists to research why claims are denied or they figure that is your job.

One other thing...employer health insurance coverage benefits are laid out by the employer who hires the insurance company as an administrator for their policy. If your health insurance denies a service, it is because your employer chose not to include it on your plan. Employers negotiate price and coverage every year with their insurance administrators. The empty heads in Washington don't seem to understand this, or they choose to ignore it. Do people really think that their employers dial up Aetna or Cigna and say 'We have x amount of dollars for employee health coverage this year...write us up a plan and we'll sign it.'  Its just like buying auto insurance...you decide what coverage you want to pay for. Same with your employer. Just one little thing more...if you get a final denial from your insurance on a treatment after appeal, the final decision comes from your employer.

You're just doing this because the President is African-American(-Indonesian)

[/sarc]

This is killer data, because it puts the lie to the democratics' talking point that the big mean insurance companies are shafting 'the folks' and that the government will fix that. Also consider that the Bamster wants to cut Medicare in a big way in order to give medical care to others, so Medicare's rejection rate will climb significantly under Obamacare.

The AETNA comparison is irrelevant; even if all the rejection rates were the same, it would point out that government does no better.