The Girl will be a year old next month, which I mention because this story won’t make sense without knowing that.
I’m still fighting my health insurance provider to get payments for the doctors who attended her birth. I’ve been denied several times now, on the grounds that The Girl’s name was not on the original enrollment form from two years ago. When I counter that the reason for that is that she hadn’t been BORN YET, I get told to send a letter to that effect.
!!!!!!
So I do, which occasions another denial.
The insurance provider, which is technically a nonprofit but you’d never know it (it rhymes with ‘shoe floss’), suffers absolutely no harm in denying payment for the birth of my daughter. In fact, quite the opposite; it continues to earn interest on the money it isn’t paying my doctors. It’s immune from lawsuit (on the novel grounds that lawsuits would drive up costs – wouldn’t want that!), immune from damages, and effectively monopolistic (I can’t shop around for another provider retroactively), so it can dawdle all it wants. In the meantime, my daughter’s doctors don’t get paid, and my credit rating is just sitting there...
By any objective standard, this is insane.
Start with the obvious: the medical literature is fairly clear on finding that childbirth often results in a child. Ergo, if childbirth is covered, you’d expect the insurance company to recognize the possibility of a resultant child. You’d think.
I tried to construct a scenario in which I played by the (retroactive) rules the company told me. Prior to birth, I would apply for a social security number for Little One. I’d get turned down, since I couldn’t specify a date of birth that hadn’t happened yet. So I’d schedule an induced labor (sorry, honey!), guess a gender, pick a name, and apply. I’d get turned down, on the grounds that there’s no birth certificate, because Little One hadn’t been BORN YET.
Meanwhile, my college struggles financially because health insurance premiums have been going up at double-digit rates for years.
Where is the money going? It obviously isn’t going to the doctors or the hospitals. It certainly isn’t going to the patients.
I have noticed lots of ads for pills that cause anal leakage and/or four-hour erections, so I assume some of the money is going into marketing. I can only assume the rest is divided between profits (the nonprofit I used is under investigation for building windfall reserves, preparatory to going for-profit) and marketing.
Nobody would design this system. It’s a money sink, and it’s starving out just about every other part of the economy (except the parts that don’t provide health insurance, like temp agencies). If rates increase 15% a year, they double in five years. That’s about the pace we’re on.
(In fact, nobody designed this system. It emerged during World War II, as employers needed to compete for employees during a wage freeze. "Fringe benefits" became the method for doing that. After the war, the interests in favor of maintaining that system blocked Truman's proposal for national health care. The insanity has mushroomed since.)
The sad thing is, higher ed gets raked over the coals for tuition increases that are far slower than health insurance increases. Our tuition increases are read as signs of waste; health insurance increases are taken as facts of nature. So we cut, and cut, and cut, and it’s never enough. We have contract negotiations coming up soon – I don’t even want to imagine how tense those will be. Nobody wants their benefits cut, but at the rate we’re going, what else is there to do?
I read that Canada just repealed its ban on private health insurance. Note to Canadian readers: are you sure?
