Yep, you heard it right. You could very well be a part of the kick-ass team of volunteers in helping us go after private insurers! Here's the deal-io. We need your help in going through the approximately 1,189 comments on the Medical Loss Ratio that was submitted to HHS.
Here's How You Can Help
- You can send me an e-mail at pleasehelpfreebarneythedog@gmail.com to sign up for the crowd-sourcing project.
- We'll start from the top down, assign several comment pages for kossacks to cover.
- For anything you find, please bookmark the page where you found the comment, and identify whether it is a consumer group or a health insurer group.
Below the jump are examples of comments submitted by insurers and consumer groups on the medical loss ratio that we've found so far.
For instance, there's a comment submitted by the state insurance commissioner of Florida, sticking up for the right of private insurance companies not to stick by the 80% medical loss ratio in the individual health market, and the accompanying attachment by Aetna.
And two consumer organizations, Health Care For All, and Advocacy For Patients With Chronic Illness, argue against re-classifying administrative expenses as medical expenses in order to "appear" to meet the requirements of the medical loss ratio.
They both lay an excellent argument against including "utilization review" as a medical expense rather than as an administrative expense. Utilization reviews are typically used to deny certain medical procedures to a patient--this is what we know as denial of care.
So, if you're a part of our team of kick-ass volunteers, and you find that private insurers have submitted a comment wanting to re-classify administration expenses such as 'case management,' 'utilization reviews,' 'pay for performance,' as medical expenses, we'll definitely let the Dkos community know about that.
Once again, here's how you can take action:
Here's How You Can Help
- You can send me an e-mail at pleasehelpfreebarneythedog@gmail.com to sign up for the crowd-sourcing project.
- We'll start from the top down, assign several comment pages for kossacks to cover.
- For anything you find, please bookmark the page where you found the comment, and identify whether it is a consumer group or a health insurer group.