Six of [California’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%. Anthem Blue Cross, the state’s largest for-profit health plan, and Kaiser, the state’s largest nonprofit plan, each rejected 28% of claims.”

Source: HMO claims-rejection rates trigger state investigation, LA Times, September 4th, 2009.
The saying, “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention”, has never been truer. This is the system that the Democrats in Congress, and Obama, want to force us to participate in. One in which we’ll be forced to pay $13,500 a year to private sector health insurance companies, plus deductibles, co-pays, and uninsured ancillaries, for the right to be randomly screwed over and financially devastated (if we live through the process) when we place a claim for coverage.
We’re being played, folks – the debate over inclusion of a “public option” is a classic diversionary maneuver by the powers that be: get all of us radicals and progressives and liberals worked into a lather over defending and demanding that they follow through on some bullshit half-assed compromise which they’ve arbitrarily defined as being within the realm of political feasibility, and keep us off the street and from demanding what we really want, and NEED – Canadian style SINGLE PAYER healthcare.

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Apple’s web site has a feature on how a Canadian health care clinic was able to benefit its patients by converting to a paperless office (running Macs, of course).
Notice what is, and is not talked about, in the article: not one word here about automating health insurance claims, reimbursement paperwork, tracking approvals from insurance companies and appeals of denied claims, optomizing the reimbursement “coding” process, or automating the bill collections process. Instead, it is all about being able to more efficiently serve the patient’s medical needs, and automating the paperwork associated with keeping a patient’s medical records up to date and usable.

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PNHP’s Senior Health Policy Fellow Don McCanne, M.D. writes a daily health policy update, taking an excerpt or quote from a health care news story or analysis on the Internet and commenting on its significance to the single-payer health care reform movement. My mother forwarded me his posting for June 29th, 2007 (not yet up on the site as of this writing), discussing a paper produced by Health Access on the topic of high deductible insurance plans.
The money quote:

…the high deductible plans would only add more stress to the thin
financial resources of middle-income families and do little to
protect families from significant medical debts of thousands of
dollars. An individual mandate for a high-deductible plan would have
a perverse result of bringing a middle-income family closer to
bankruptcy, not protecting it.

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