Healthcare Billing Schemes Should Be an Afront to Everyone
Opinion Advocates for ideas and draws conclusions based on the author/producer’s interpretation of facts and data.
I am seeing red after reading the most recent installment of Adam Stone’s deep dive into the workings of UnitedHealth/Optum (March 18). The medical billing scheme that is described in this article offers more evidence that companies like United Health are repeatedly placing their own profits over patient care. Engaging in practices to manipulate patient diagnoses so that their billing results in larger revenues is disturbing and fraudulent.
Equally upsetting is knowing that UnitedHealth, along with the other providers of so-called Medicare Advantage plans, participate in excessive denial of claims, delays of service and predatory marketing schemes, all with the goals of maximizing profits while impeding patient care. An analysis released last year by Physicians for a National Health Program (https://pnhp.org/system/assets/uploads/2023/09/MAOverpaymentReport_Final.pdf) estimated that UnitedHealth, along with the other private Medicare Advantage plans, reaped excess profits of as much as $140 billion a year by using these strategies.
Finally, my blood boils knowing that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid has proposed a payment hike of 3.7 percent from taxpayer dollars to these same private Medicare Advantage plans for 2025. As if $140 billion a year isn’t enough!
So many issues crop up daily about our compromised healthcare system. Those of us who rely on that system must say that we are no longer going to accept this manipulative, greedy behavior. They have crossed my red line, and I won’t take it anymore. You shouldn’t either.
Madeline Hunter
Ossining
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