Monday, February 28, 2011

Hawaii Senate Bill 1274 is an attack on our health care rights

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The health care rights of almost everyone in Hawaii with health insurance are under attack.
 
For anyone with employer-paid or Medicaid health insurance through Kaiser, HMSA, HMAA, Aloha Care, Evercare or Ohana,  if you get cancer or some other serious disease and your insurance company denies coverage, you have the right to appeal that decision with an independent local hearing, with expert witnesses and attorneys on your side. 
 
If Hawaii State Senate Bill 1274 is passed on March 10, we will all lose that right.
 
Please sign our petition to stop this bill from passing.

Here is the text of the email that will be sent to Governor Abercrombie as well as all our state Senators.

Aloha,

My health care rights are under attack and I need your help to stop it.

Right now, if my health insurance company refuses to pay for treatment that my doctor says is necessary, I have the right to appeal that decision at an independent, local hearing. I am entitled to a lawyer, and the insurance company will be required to pay for my lawyer and any expert testimony I need to prove my case.

S.B. 1274 will repeal HRS 432E-6.

HRS 432E-6 gives everyone with HMSA, HMAA, Aloha Care, Kaiser, Evercare or Ohana health insurance, whether paid for by their employer or Medicaid, the legal right to those independent local hearings. If you allow S.B. 1274 to pass, that right will be taken away. Insurance company decisions on life or death treatment will be reviewed somewhere on the mainland depriving me of the right to attend, let alone present expert testimony that could save my life.

You need to put a stop to allowing state legislation to be drafted by companies that can pay their top executives almost $2 million in bonuses for 2010.

You also need to put a stop to allowing life and death health care decisions for our most vulnerable citizens to be made by a company that paid its CEO over $9.4 million in direct compensation in 2009. Why are you allowing valuable federal funding to be spent supporting these outrageous profits?

Please protect our rights, and vote no to S.B. 1274.
Please help us spread the word!

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About Me

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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.