The disability rights, civil rights, womens rights, family rights, senior rights and healthcare rights advocates need to unite to stop Medicaid and Medicare being sold off to for-profit HMOs. Please take our poll: should Medicaid and Medicare be sold to for-profit HMOs?
Unfortunately, the process has already been underway since the Bush days, reaching almost $11 billion a month in government revenues paid to for-profit HMOS. That amount is growing, for some companies as fast as twenty percent within six months.
I'm the mother of a beautiful and loving soon-to-be 12 year old who is at 24/7 risk of death from epilepsy. Hannah's life was auctioned off to one of these companies (Unitedhealth) in February 2009 so I see every day the impact of its spectacular earnings growth on her daily life. There is a huge disability community on the internet, and I see the impacts there as well. They are intensifying as more and more states are requiring Medicaid recipients with disabilities to join these for-profit HMOs.
They have taken away from us the right of choice.
The companies aren't cutting services to our children because "the budget" has been cut. In fact, if you live in Hawaii, New York, Florida, Georgia and a few other states, your for-profit Medicaid HMO got a premium raise from your state. That's an increase to the budget, not a decrease.
What's getting cut is how much of the premium your Medicaid HMO is being paid for your child that is actually being spent on medical care. The health insurance industry calls it the "Medical loss ratio," I think of it as the "Patient loss ratio", some companies are reasonably straightforward and call it the "health benefits ratio."
If you google "medical loss ratio", you will see that this little number is playing a large role in Washington politicking. I've uploaded a number of articles about it here. The point is, it represents the amount of the premium spent on actual medical costs as a percentage of the premium. If a company reports an 80% MLR to federal regulators, it means they spent only eighty percent of the money allocated for the care of our children (for example), and saved the rest by denying medically necessary services and treatments.
A twenty percent "patient loss ratio" is what these companies brazenly report to the SEC. Federal investigations have revealed companies fraudulently inflating costs by up to 299%, and so a 50% PLR estimate could be conservative.
These companies are stealing from our children, our grandparents, and our communities' most vulnerable populations.
We can't change something we don't know about, so please help us spread the word.
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