On Breast Cancer Rescission, WellPoint Claims Journalistic Error, White House Piles On (UPDATED)

Well, I sure am glad sternly worded letters are still in.

Media tell the truth and it’s the media’s fault. Oh the horror!

misstates the role of what it terms computer algorithms.
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Wow. That is the weakest non-denial I’ve ever read. That’s really the best they can do? Why not pull a McConnell and just lie and hope it all works out? This statement is just pointless.

Under the new law, insurance companies can still cancel policies “in cases of fraud or intentional misrepresentation of material fact,” as Sebelius notes.
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But isn’t the point that new rules on pre-existing conditions mean insurance companies won’t be rescissioning (?) people based on diagnostic codes?

“I hope you will consider these women and their families as you work to end this harmful practice,”

I also hope to win the lottery and for world peace. But I am not holding my breath for either.

Evidently, some of my fellow commenter don’t recognize the iron fist in the velvet glove when it shows up. That letter clearer — cut that crap out or we will remember how you acted and be sure to consider it when it’s time to consider your worthiness to enter the exchanges. By the way, you do realize that at some point the exchanges won’t just cover those who currently are uninsured. Eventually they will cover everyone seeking health insurance. We would hate to see you totally without access to those buying your core product.

‘We do not single out breast cancer or pregnancy.’

Doesn’t that make you feel better about WellPoint? After all, they don’t just screw people with breast cancer. They have a non-discriminatory, equal opprotunity ‘screw everybody’ policy.

@bob: ‘Zactly!

Scum is too kind a word for these sorts of people and their practices.

Amazing how no one on this blog, nor any of it’s writers have any idea what “defraying risk” means, in terms of insurance or derivatives.
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Personally I’ll keep paying for my “scum is too kind a word” insurance, but I’m sure that I only do that because unbeknownst to me I’m really a “fat cat conservative” who cares nothing for the plight of the average person.
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Oh… wait, I’ve been unemployed now for awhile and wasn’t eligible for unemployment from the beloved government because it doesn’t seem to care about little ol’ me and the fact that I barely don’t qualify. So I am now surviving on loans (from evil corporations no less!) and digging into my savings for that insurance money, yet I don’t feel I’m being ripped off, because the last person I know that had a serious car accident ended up with hospital bills of $172,000. Of which insurance paid all but $7400 (4.3% of the total). But I’m sure that $200 a month premium wasn’t worth the $164,600 (823 months or 68.59 years of premiums) they didn’t have to pay for that lifesaving treatment which allowed them to get back to a fully functional life.
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Clearly they WAY overpaid that greedy insurance company, who clearly dropped them like they do every person who needs money back from the company.
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You guys have a pretty good argument going; other than a total ignorance of how a free market works, basic economics and history, what charity actually is as well as a total fear of competition, responsibility and reality. Other than that, you have an amazing arguement.
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Just like the people on the Swamp and Europeans who continually bash the U.S. military while basking in the safety it provides us and most of the rest of the world.
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If you have such distaste for the U.S. system (which needs work no doubt, but not total destruction and replacement), move the Venezuela the new Utopia of the Western Hemisphere. Just don’t bother saying anything like this while you’re there:
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“I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. And we should stand up and say ‘We are Americans and we have right to debate and disagree with any administration!’”
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That wasn’t a tea party person, that was Hillary Clinton on April 28,2003. Of course now, if you disagree with Obama you’re a racist.
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And if you disagree with me, you’re a homophobic racist who pours milk on kittens in the hope of turning them to cannibalism. (Did I sound too much like Olberman on that one?)

The new law is going hurt insurance companies, whose job is not to pay out claims, but to make money for their stock holders. Health insurance companies are doing, and have been doing everything they are required to do. It can be no other way with for-profit insurance companies. Seriously, the only way to have a system in which insurance companies don’t have to worry about the bottom line is for all of them to be non-profit, or for a single payer system. That will happen because the health care law is going to eventually put a lot of companies out of business.

@erieangel — The issue is, in fact, whether health insurance companies are doing … everything they are required to do. Basically, what they are required to do, with respect to those they insure, is what their contract with the insured calls for, Most contracts allow for rescission if the insurance company discovers that the insured, when an applicant, misrepresented his or her medical condition. The problem with the behavior of WellPoint and the like is not that they enforce this provision but that they OVERenforce it.
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When I was a kid I had a cyst on my leg so large that my GP called it a tumor. It was benign, it was removed, and I lived happily ever after. But suppose that forty years later, while applying for insurance, I had forgotten about it and neglected to include it in my application. Then imagine that a few years later I somehow came down with TB. Does my cyst from half a century ago have anything to do with my TB? Of course not. Yet many an insurance company, if it somehow found out about the cyst, would rescind my poilicy and leave me to pay the costs of the TB treatment. Worse yet, imagine that I got cancer instead of TB and they discovered that when I was a kid I had what one doctor called a tumor. Whammo!
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It’s certainly proper, whatever the results otherwise, to rescind the policy of someone who has a bout of cancer and omits all mention of it when subsequently applying for insurance. But the cases Reuters reports were more like the example about my “tumor.” In fact, it appears that in some cases there wasn’t even a pretext: “She’s got cancer? Let’s cancel her. We can fake something if she challenges us.” That’s not moral or ethical, nor is is doing what insurance companies are required (your word) to do. They are required to provide coverage to people who apply for it and honestly report their condition at the time of application.
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There’s certainly nothing wrong with a law that makes insurance companies include such a provision in their contracts and abide honestly by it. Indeed, there’s nothing wrong with a law requiring that the omission from the application be “material” — failing to mention a prior hangnail shouldn’t disqualify you from coverage for cancer tratment. Unless Reuters got ithe facts wrong about the specific cases — and I don’t think it did — WellPoint is way over the line of not just ethics and morality but the reasonable intent of the contract., which is to protect them from liars but not from people whose only offense is to contract an expensive disease.
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And although we’re all proud of Sasquatch for his Randian self-reliance, even the free-est society needs someone to police those who won’t honor their contracts.

‘Intentional misrepresentation’ like forgetting you got a prescription for an acne treatment once and that is justification for canceling your policy when you end up with skin cancer later. This stuff actually happens all the time. To suggest that certain diagnostic codes trigger suspicion that you might have a condition you knew about, but failed to disclose is absurd. You know who assigns diagnostic codes? It’s not your doctor–it’s administrative staff. Sometimes they just take their best guess and assign whatever code they think will be reimbursed. Your insurance company can ruin you financially based on a stupid clerical error by a glorified secretary. To justify rescission is essentially promoting the insurance industry position that some people just deserve to die from lack of treatment because they are too costly to the profit margins of the major insurers. Nice system we got here.