DailyDirt: Healthcare Nightmares

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The healthcare industry in the US is crazy, and it's not a simple task to assign blame. Many patients aren't paying out of their own pockets because they rely on insurance, but then this arrangement doesn't provide any incentive for patients to try shopping around. On the other hand, even if patients wanted to shop around, it's nearly impossible to determine what the prices of any medical procedures are because they vary widely based on the hospital and what payment arrangements have been negotiated behind closed doors. If you've ever had medical treatment that required any kind of specialized testing or surgery, you've probably never fully understood the resulting bill (congratulations to you if you do understand all your medical bills). Here are just a couple examples of some not-so-uncommon experiences with the healthcare system.

• Megan Rothbauer had a heart attack, and an ambulance took her to a hospital just three blocks away from a different hospital that works with her Blue Cross Blue Shield insurer. She was unconscious at the time, and the difference has forced her into bankruptcy from the medical bills. If she had been taken to the "correct" hospital, she would have owed about $1,500, but instead her bills exceeded $250,000. [url]
• Jeffrey Craig Hopper went to the "correct" hospital when he was accidentally hit in the eye with a baseball at a little league game, but he didn't realize that even though the hospital was in-network, that the ER doctor who treated him wasn't. Some states try to minimize this out-of-network billing practice, but during an emergency, it's a bit difficult to shop around for urgent care physicians. [url]
• Massachusetts passed a law a couple years ago to make medical pricing more transparent, and recently, the state has mandated that insurers must offer real-time prices by provider in user-friendly formats. It's a step in the right direction, but the information isn't exactly consumer-friendly yet because the real-time prices change frequently and are often not listed for easy apple-to-apple comparisons. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bills, economics, health, health insurance, healthcare, medicine

Amanda Palmer Unleashes The Voice Of The People About Health Insurance Via Twitter

from the it-all-comes-together dept

As mentioned, last week, we held an all day brainstorming event, bringing together artists and entrepreneurs to talk about the challenges and opportunities that we all face, and to see if there are ways to help each other. I'll have a full writeup on that later this week, but one point that was raised by some of the musicians at the session was that "success" can mean different things to different people, and one full-time musician pointed out that just being able to afford her own health insurance was a kind of "success," in that it showed she'd been able to earn enough to cover that bare minimum of "necessities." So it's interesting to see, just days later, that Amanda Palmer is making a lot of news today with her fascinating #InsurancePoll campaign, which she started after reading Nicholas Kristof's story about his college roommate, who has prostate cancer and is in bad shape -- in large part because he put off going to the doctor since he didn't have health insurance. In response, Amanda realized that many musicians, similarly, do not have health insurance, and she tweeted about it:

most small-to-mid-level musicians i know don't have health insurance. some musicians find tricky ways, some pay, most take the risk & pray.
when i was in my early twenties, buying my own insurance would have been equal half my rent. it just didn't seem like an option. my parents had just watched the death of my step-brother (uninsured when stricken with a disease) almost destroy the family bank, and so they DEMANDED i get insurance.
we fought.
they offered to pay half.
i agreed.
i was lucky.
many aren't.

From there, lots of other people responded with stories about their own health insurance situation, and she decided to ask people more directly about their own health insurance situation with a quick poll question:

quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?

— Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) October 14, 2012

The end result was tons of people responding, most using the #InsurancePoll hashtag. That seemed quite interesting to Amanda, who got a volunteer to start tallying up all of the info. And she noticed some of the commentary, which noted that people in various countries were somewhat unaware of how things were elsewhere:

people OUTSIDE the US were looking at all the tweets from the US and feeling really, really, really bad for us. and some younger tweeters (teenagers, i can only assume) were shocked that we americans don't have what they have (the NHS was getting a lot of love and support from the brits, especially seeing as it's under threat).

people INSIDE the US couldn't believe what people OUTSIDE the US didn't KNOW. this is the amazing power of twitter sometimes. we all think we share common knowledge, and then something like this pops up and BAM – you see a whole bunch of people in different countries shocking the hell out of each other. we all know that lance armstrong doped, that lady gaga gained weight, , etc….but tons of people in the UK/Finland/Australia/etc don't know the extent to which US people FREAK OUT on a daily/monthly/yearly basis about insurance. how much it changes our lives. and how EVERYbody has a story.

No matter what your stand is on health insurance or healthcare, you can't deny that this bit of information sharing is both powerful and impressive. Amanda and the volunteer are going to tally up all the data and release it when it's ready, which should be interesting as well. While this is hardly a scientific or randomized survey, it is interesting information that is making more people aware of the situation that others are in. When you think about the power of social media to even create such a discussion (outside the normal realms of political fighting), it's really amazing.

Filed Under: amanda palmer, education, health insurance, information, people, sharing, social media

The New Children's Health Plan Is Videogames?

from the well,-that's-one-way dept

theodp writes "Remember how Catbert once declared 'The new company health plan is Google'? Well, for some kids, the new health plan may be videogames. While health insurer Humana has opted out of 'child-only' health insurance coverage to skirt around requirements of President Obama's health reform, uninsurable children with pre-existing conditions are still presumably welcome to use Trainer, the Humana-bankrolled-and-branded videogame that took home $20,000 last month as the Grand Prize winner in First Lady Michelle Obama's Apps for Healthy Kids Competition. Over at the USDA site, Humana is praised for having 'generously provided a gift to fund the development of the [Trainer] game...that will help children and their families live healthier, happier lives. No child is alone on the road to better health.'"

There is, of course, nothing wrong in general with using video games as one part of helping kids stay healthy, but it does seem especially sleazy to do this while pulling child-only health insurance.

Filed Under: health insurance, healthcare, video games
Companies: humana

Astroturf Health Insurance Lobbying Group Paying Social Gamers To Oppose Health Reform

from the wow dept

We've seen plenty of stories of "astroturf" campaigns by lobbyists looking to influence public policy by pretending that there's grassroots support for some corporate position. And, we've seen stories of virtual goods scams taking place on various social networks, which are used to get unsophisticated social gamers to sign up for subscriptions to things that they don't want. But what happens when you combine the two?

Nicholas Carlson has an astounding story about a health insurance astroturf group that is using those social gaming "offer" services to get gamers to contact their elected officials to oppose health care reform in exchange for virtual currency in games. Yes, health insurance companies are basically trying to bribe a bunch of Farmville and Mafia Wars players on Facebook to send messages to their representatives, that say: "I am concerned a new government plan could cause me to lose the employer coverage I have today. More government bureaucracy will only create more problems, not solve the ones we have." In exchange, you get some virtual currency to spend.

The group behind this virtual bribery astroturfing effort is backed by a who's who of insurance trade associations... and when Carlson tried to contact them for comment, the email bounced. Nice to see that some of the scammiest lobbying groups out there have found some of the scammiest marketing techniques out there as well.

Filed Under: astrotuf, health care, health insurance, health reform, lobbying, social gaming