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Denying Healthcare
In the course of President Obama and his Liberals’ ongoing war to nationalize the health insurance industry we Americans have been subjected to countless rants about how those “evil insurance giants” keep denying people’s insurance claims and withholding coverage from them in the “selfish” pursuit of shareholder value.
To the Leftists only a Public Option will save us.
So let’s look at the data provided by the American Medical Association (AMA) itself in order to see which health insurance providers seem eager to deny patients’ claims:
| Insurance Provider | % of Claims Denied |
| Medicare | 6.85% |
| Aetna | 6.80% |
| Anthem BCBS | 4.62% |
| Health Net | 3.88% |
| CIGNA | 3.44% |
| Humana | 2.90% |
| Coventry | 2.88% |
| United Healthcare | 2.68% |
Much like President Obama’s lies about ObamaCare covering abortions and illegal immigrants, his and his followers’ sob stories and angry rantings about insurance companies denying patients’ claims veer very far from a true and objective account of the situation.
Medicare, America’s best known nationalized health insurance program, denies a higher percentage of claims than any other health insurance provider monitored by AMA in their annual National Health Insurer Report Card (NHIRC).
This is not something that the Liberals, enamored as they are of government controlled, administered, and regulation healthcare, want Americans to hear. Their agenda can’t survive the truth.
At first glance it would seem that the private health insurance company, Aetna, runs a sadly close second in denying people’s health insurance claims. A slight bit of research in the AMA’s 2008 NHIRC shows that this initial opinion is wrong though. 65.7% of the claims that Aetna denied were denied because the benefit for the service was already included in the payment for another service or procedure that had already been adjudicated. If one factors out these duplicate claims, Aetna’s overall percentage of denied claims is only 4.47%.
Medicare’s claim denial figures have no similar amelioration to be found within the AMA’s annual scorecard. Indeed, the top 5 reasons – which together total 76.8% of the total denied claims – Medicare has given for denying patients’ claims are far less than soothing.
| Reason For Denial | % of Denied |
| Paperwork error in Claim | 27.80% |
| Claim deemed as not a “medical necessity” | 20.90% |
| Claim not covered by this payer/contractor | 13.80% |
| Non-covered charge(s) | 8.50% |
| Patient couldn’t be identified as insured | 5.80% |
Paperwork errors, flat-out denial of coverage, and the inability to identify and track enrollees – these are the government’s primary reasons for denying healthcare benefits to the American citizenry.
…And yes, this is exactly the sort of Hope and Change that Obama threatened America with during his campaign for the Presidency. Americans’ were duly warned of the Reconstruction.
Judging by how the federal government administers Medicare, ObamaCare would be, “A medical system with the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, and the financial solvency of the Social Security system.” That is something that Americans can and should do everything and anything within their power to prevent from happening to us, our children, and our children’s children.
Tags: AMA | America | Capitalism | Freedom | Healthcare | Insurance | Lies | Obama | Politics | Socialism | Truth
