Rochester Health Insurer Bilked Consumers Out of Hundreds Millions
File under “why for-profit health insurance no worky“:
The settlement stems from a statewide investigation, which found that all major insurers in New York determined how much to reimburse patients for visiting an out-of-network doctor by using a database created by the country’s second-largest health insurer, UnitedHealth Group. The Ingenix database set rates by using billing information provided by insurance companies, which understated medical costs and defrauded consumers out of hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 10 years, Cuomo’s investigation concluded.
All major insurers? Why would they do this? It seems really, really unethical. To answer, let’s consult the “Corporate Handbook for For-Profit Health Insurance”, p. 1:
- The purpose of a corporation is to maximize profit, not ensure a hea.
- Have whiny patients with so-called “health care needs”? See rule number 1.
Kudos to AG Cuomo. Aside from the insurance companies increasing their margins by outsourcing all their paperwork to my wife (so it seems), this kind of thing makes it understandable why they’ve seen record profits over the last few years. What else will we find the more we turn over the rocks where this culture of “profit over health” thrives?
And kudos to Congressman Eric Massa, for being out in front of fundamentally fixing this corrupt, broken system. This news story underlines Obama’s assertion that our current healthcare system is the biggest threat to our economy.
National, single-payer health insurance. As Massa put it on 1370 Connection earlier this week: “Publicly funded, privately provided.”
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