OK, so I'm sitting in this required meeting....
As a side note, if you knew me in person, you would totally catch the full on sarcasm I would have used with those last two words. I HATE meetings. Hate. Them. And this meeting had a good representation of the flow chart: My boss, the boss's boss, the head of finance AND the CEO.
....and one of the issues they covered was insurance.
In order to make our lives easier, they actually typed out all of the insurances our hospital accepts, plus provided a contact numbers for each of them.
To date, there are a dozen separate companies, all with varies and sundry procedures one must follow. We actually have a four hour time line for one of them--it doesn't matter what time of the day or night we admit someone to our hospital.
Furthermore, this is now part of my job. When I'm at an ER and I recommend someone for hospitalization and happen to send them to MY hospital, I now get to call and wrangle with one of a dirty dozen insurance companies.
Good times.
So glad I have my little cheat sheet available to me now (I had to dig it out of the recycle bin) so I won't get confused on which insurances we accept versus which ones we don't.
Let's examine the profound ridiculousness of this, shall we?
1) God knows how many private insurance companies abound nationwide, but having to keep with any more than say, two, is, in my opinion, asking too much of any employee. As you all know, every insurance policy comes with a manual that is the paper equivalent to "Celebration of the Lizard". In Swahili. Who needs a dozen of THAT?
2) Can you imagine the paper waste that came with having to print all this information out? Not to mention the waste of employee resources, as someone had to take the time to research and compile all of this? And no, I'm not talking about at the insurance companies--I'm talking about at my hospital.
3) Who in their right mind wants to deal with insurance agents at ANY point? Ever?
4) Let's add MORE paperwork, shall we? Because now I have ask for all sorts of personal information (like I haven't done that already) including the social security number of the primary insurance holder. Which, hello? Serious breech of privacy, IMHO.
4) Oh, and minor quibble here, but we also have the issue of having to actually consider how someone is going to finance a hospital stay when they're suicidal.
This part of the meeting took up a good ten minutes, by the way. At one point, I, always at the ready with a snappy one-liner, pointed out:
Me: You know, if we had a single payer health system in this country, we wouldn't even need to have this conversation
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tXCM/~3/uZZnD17emt0/appalling-state-of-us-health-system.html
Posted
6 Jul 2009 6:19 PM
by
Trench Warfare
| Report Abuse