Whose Death Panel was that?

Who is already rationing Health Care and who will let it continue? The Senate Finance Committee and Republicans have taken a good plan and destroyed it and we the people are letting it happen by throwing up our hands and believing there is nothing we can do.

It big news comes from the medical community - The California Nurses Association. I know, from my time as Credit manager at a hospital, that this rings true. The insurance industry will give all kinds of excuses for rejecting claims. Preexisting conditions, some of the claims were later paid, the insurance expired but in the end it's that a large percentage of "covered" individuals got rejected. I know someone whose personal insurance (self employed) pays a very large premium for a policy with a $3,000 deductible - each claim not per year:

"Six of the state’s largest insurers rejected 45.7 million claims for medical care, or 22% of all claims, from 2002 to June 30, 2009, according to the California Nurses Assn.’s analysis of data submitted to regulators by the companies.

The rejection rates ranged from a high of 39.6% for PacifiCare to 6.5% for Aetna for the first half of 2009. Cigna denied 33%, and Health Net 30%.

Getting health insurers to pay their fair share of medical claims can be as much of a headache for physicians as it is for patients, said Rebecca Patchin, an anesthesiologist at Loma Linda University and board chairwoman of the American Medical Assn. She said each insurer has a different set of obscure, bureaucratic rules for processing and paying medical claims that result in as much as $210 billion of unnecessary cost annually, studies have shown."

In another Story I found this:

"More than one of every five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient's physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers, amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation's biggest state, according to data released today by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee.

PacifiCare denied 40 percent of all California claims in the first six months of 2009. Cigna, which gained notoriety two years ago for denying a liver transplant to 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan of Northridge, Calif. and then reversing itself, tragically too late to save her life, was still rejecting one-third of all claims for the first half of 2009.


Kaiser Permanente, which denied 28 percent of all claims in the first half of 2009, was one of two systems to reject options for radiation and chemotherapy for 57-year-old Bob Scott of Sacramento after his diagnosis of a brain tumor in 2005. The reason cited was his age, says wife Cheryl Scott, RN. "He had been in perfect health all of his life. This was his first problem other than a sprained ankle. He died six months later."

"The United States remains the only country in the industrialized world where human lives are sacrificed for private profit, a national disgrace that seems on the verge of perpetuation," she said."