Health insurance  has been much in the news recently. The only people who seem particularly happy with insurance in general are those who own insurance companies, those who lobby for insurance companies, and members of Congress. Sadly, over the last few years, what laws do regulate the industry were written by insurance company lawyers; just like in a casino as with insurance companies, the odds are always stacked in favor of "the house". You play the games, you take your chances.

Paying your insurance premiums regularly (i.e. remaining in compliance with your policy) has little to do with how well, or for what you are actually covered. Nobody, at least nobody in the US, can truly consider themselves to be "well insured" until they actually have to use their insurance by filing a claim (i.e. asking the insurance company to comply with your policy)… This means you usually have the procedure BEFORE you ever find out how it is going to cost you, and if you can even afford it. "After-the-fact" reimbursement policies benefit only the insurers, and often end up costing people their jobs, their homes, their families and even their lives. There is no other industry that authorizes actions without letting you know what your costs are going to be; insurance companies do not have to provide "estimates", and anything you are told over the phone is never a promise of a guarantee. The words "insurance", "promise" and "guarantee" used to be closely interlinked… but no longer with health care.

Most people find tremendous frustration when calling their insurance company’s customer service line. When you finally get a person on the line, they ask what they need. If you are talking with "Claims" and you have a question about your benefits, you will get put on hold and transferred to the "Benefits" department; who has no information regarding your claims. Ask the wrong question again, and once again you will find yourself listening to repetitive, annoying music while "waiting for the next representative" in yet another department. If you ask about "Durable Medical Equipment" (the category that UVBioTek narrowband home systems fall into, among many other things), you’ll find yourself transferred yet again to someone who has no information regarding either your claims or your benefits.

There are several reasons for this. One major factor driving all this compartmentalization is a set of regulations called "HIPAA" (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). HIPAA was intended to protect the confidentiality of a patient’s medical information. This mandates people to being restricted to only having access to what they need to know to complete their job. So, anyone working in "Claims" is prohibited from seeing your "Benefits" information, and so on. Getting a simple question answered can be maddening, causing many people to simply give up and pay for it themselves or go without the treatment. Going without a medically prescribed treatment, primarily because you cannot afford it is hardly "fully insured", and yet it happens to thousands of people every single day.

Oddly enough, this can be almost as frustrating for the people answering the phones at the insurance companies. They are much like waiters in a restaurant; they don’t have any control over what they present to you; but they have to deal with the person who ordered steak and was served soup instead. One thing is for sure; it can test the patience of almost any person… and was most likely deliberately designed and intended to do exactly that

Not to worry. When you purchase a UVBioTek system, we will deal with your insurance company so you don’t have to. We can tell you what you need, what you need to send to us, and how much you can expect them to cover. We can help remove the stresses associated with getting insurance answers, and work towards getting you approved for the therapeutic needs your doctor has prescribed, at for the largest reimbursement you are entitled to.

Tags: approval, compliance, health insurance, healthcare, HIPAA, insurance denial, medical insurance, narrowband, premiums, UVB, UVBioTek

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Basic information. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.