Every month, six private insurance carriers generate a $1.1 billion gross profit from government funds received on behalf of Medicaid and Medicare policyholders.
These are state and federal funds that were to be used for providing care for the elderly, children, and children as well as adults with disabilities. The profits are made, and increased (as quarterly SEC filings show) by cutting medical care and services, whether by suddenly denying longstanding prescriptions, reducing home medical supplies, or slashing the home care services that keep our children and grandparents at home with their families and not in institutions.
What do you think? Is this right? There is an alternative, that providers be non-profits, or rigidly monitor and enforce an MLR in the high nineties.
Please take our poll and let us know what you think!
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
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About Me
- Disability Mom
- I'm the mom of a child with disabilities. Hannah's first neurologist said she might never develop beyond the level of a 2 month old infant, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The brain damage was just too severe. Nine years later, she walks, uses a touchscreen computer and I've just been shown she can learn to construct sentences and do simple math with the right piece of technology. Along the way, I discovered I needed to teach myself what Hannah's rights to services really were. Learning about early intervention services led to reading about IDEA and then to EPSDT. I've been waiting for the Obama administration to realize the power and potential of EPSDT for the medical rights - including the right to stay at home with their families - of children with disabilities. The health reform people talk about long term care, and the disability people talk about education and employment, but nobody is talking about EPSDT. So I am.
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