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Insurance Company Begins New Ad Campaign In The Face Of Health Reform

Trudy Lieberman Cigna launched a $25 million “GO YOU” national branding campaign last week signaling that they are gearing up for tons of new customers as health reform rolls towards 2014.   That new business will come from the millions of Americans now uninsured who will start getting government subsidies as an encouragement to buy health insurance coverage.  If those uninsured folks don’t get coverage, they will have tax penalties to pay.

No insurer wants to be left behind in this expanding marketplace, so Cigna, by being first out of the gate, hopes to build brand awareness that will ring bells in 2014 when consumers must buy insurance.  It’s a smart strategy.  One industry consultant says “most insurers have not built enough brand equity with consumers.”

Cigna’s ad campaign positions health insurance as Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Prepared Patient Forum: What It Takes Blog*

The Health Insurance Industry’s Unnecessary Expenses

I have described how the healthcare insurance industry loads its expenses into direct patient care expenses to increase their profits.

The Medical-Loss Ratio calculation is not reported by the traditional media. The healthcare insurance industry spends less healthcare dollars on direct patient care after it is permitted by federal and local agencies to load its expenses into the direct patient care column.

Simply put, the healthcare insurance industry cooks the books to increase its net profit.

Another way to increase profits is to shortchange physicians on medical claims. In fact, 20% of medical claims payments are inaccurate according to the American Medical Association’s (AMA) fourth annual National Health Insurer Report Card. Claims-processing errors by health insurance companies waste billions of dollars and frustrate patients and physicians.

This is one of the reasons the RAND report about physicians controlling waste is so absurd to me. The healthcare insurance industry creates waste in order to increase net profit. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Economic Incentives Motivate: What We Can Learn From The Rand Health Insurance Experiment

The use of economic incentives to motivate behavior is neither a Democratic or Republican idea. It is human nature to be motivated by economic incentives. The concept of individual responsibility is an American idea. It has been tarnished in recent years.

There is no question in my mind that government has the responsibility to be compassionate and help the needy. It is my view that government should help individuals help themselves.

The costs associated with Medicare and traditional healthcare insurance are rising. Every stakeholder points a finger at the other stakeholders as the cause.

President Obama’s Healthcare Reform Act is raising costs higher in anticipation of cuts in the future. He is in the process of forcing individuals to be more dependent on the government rather than promoting individual responsibility.

Obamacare will fail to control costs.

All anyone has to do is look at a Rand Corp. study of 29 years ago to see what works and what doesn’t work. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Repairing the Healthcare System*

Un-Insurance Reform

Who doesn’t need insurance reform? Why, the insurers like Aetna, Cigna, and BCS Insurance, that’s who! From Emergency Physicians Monthly:

By threatening to raise health care premiums by 200 percent or threatening to drop coverage altogether, the companies got the Department of Health and Human Services to cave. Now the companies have our government’s blessing to continue offering “insurance” to their employees that is capped at a few thousand dollars per year instead of the $750,000 required in the health care law.

Perhaps GruntDoc said it best:

“I am not an Obamacare fan, and would like it repealed, with smaller, more focused Bipartisan fixes, but if the government is going to pass something then roll over this easily to special interests… it’s already worse than useless.”

-WesMusings of a cardiologist and cardiac electrophysiologist.

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Latest Interviews

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It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

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I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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