Health Care Thread

"Unfortunately, about 500 of our existing members in California who had automatic payment set up for their current plans were inadvertently charged before our systems recognized their enrollment in new plans through Covered California," the state's exchange, he wrote in an email. "We have identified the affected members and are in the process of contacting them to make them aware of the mistake, and of course, our commitment to refund the extra charge.

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In other words, they are getting their money back if they didn't want the shifted over policy - it's a completely pointless article. I'm actually dealing with the same (on dental insurance though) right now, and I'm not concerned because the minute I called them and asked what was up with them charging us for the policy we cancelled this past month (our dentist is dropping Delta so we switched policies rather than dentists) it took about 45 seconds on the phone to get them to say, "Yep, ok - we'll have a chargeback done within the week".

Oh the horror of being out the cash a week or so. Or whatever other timeframe this ends up being - overcharges/mistaken charges happen ALL THE TIME but on other topics I'm sure you don't care.

Anthem finally sent me my insurance card at least. So only a month late. And the numbers listed for deductible and such are all the post-subsidy figures, so that's kind of nice. The critics turned out to be full of shit because I don't pay the full amount and then hope the government sends me a check on time - the subsidy is already taken out of the premium. There's no reimbursement hell as the parrots were trumpeting for the past year.

What I find disturbing is that the card and the first invoice came with no instructions or information of any kind. No welcome booklet, no friendly phone calls, nothing. Here's your card, pay us. To get any info you have to call or sign up on the Anthem website and it's as slow and crappy as I remember from years back. Oh, and online bill pay is a separate account for some reason.

Personal insurance sucks. Just wait until people who have never dealt with this before find out how much trouble it is.

Now to go get my first checkup in five years and find out how I'm going to die.

The insurance companies also mailed out notices back in August-October telling their non-grandfathered clients that they needed to make an election or get rolled over into a new compliant plan. First there's outrage that "hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their healthcare coverage", which was a crock of shit from day 1. They just got rolled over to a new compliant plan on a tier similar to what they had previously. Now there's outrage that those people didn't in fact lose their coverage; they were just rolled over to a new compliant plan unless they elected to go another route and inform their carrier.

Here's the gem from the article:

Here's what happened to Kingma and others: When they received letters last fall, they were informed that their plans had been canceled. But within the letter, it also said thatif they did nothing, they would be switched over to a different planand if they had set up their payment to autodraft from their account, it would continue to do so.

Kingma said he didn't read the whole letter, just enough of it to know his old plan was being canceled.

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Yes, it sucks if this happened to you, but you have no one to blame but yourself because they gave you months of warning. Also as mentioned, most companies allowed cancellations retroactive to Jan. 1.

wormie_sl said:

Yeah except not really. I went from a hospital only plan of 189 dollars to silver package that costs 456. But that makes no difference. These shit companies have no right to enroll anyone into plans without explicit permission from the people being enrolled. Just because i didnt bother responding does not give them any right to withdraw money from my bank account and sign me up for whatever the fuck they want. Fuck them and i hope they get raped by AGs everywhere.

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I can understand being mad if you were on like a $5,000 deductible plan and got enrolled in a Silver, because that's not supposed to happen. Other than that, they took you from a now illegal plan, and in order to comply with the law, rolled you over to a legal one. Every year health insurers discontinue certain plans, re-enroll people that were in them in similar plans, and give them the option to switch to something else if they want. This is nothing new and has been going on for a long time. In 2013 every plan Anthem offered was different than the ones they offered just a few years ago.

And you didn't fill out an EFT form when you enrolled? Because if they had been drafting money from your account, then yeah, you did give them authorization before that.

Disp_sl said:

I can understand being mad if you were on like a $5,000 deductible plan and got enrolled in a Silver, because that's not supposed to happen. Other than that, they took you from a now illegal plan, and in order to comply with the law, rolled you over to a legal one. Every year health insurers discontinue certain plans, re-enroll people that were in them in similar plans, and give them the option to switch to something else if they want. This is nothing new and has been going on for a long time. In 2013 every plan Anthem offered was different than the ones they offered just a few years ago.

And you didn't fill out an EFT form when you enrolled? Because if they had been drafting money from your account, then yeah, you did give them authorization before that.

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So he was illegally spending too little money and now the government was kind enough to fix the problem. Got it.

When they were updating your policy to be compliant with the law you didn't opt out when given the option, which means you accepted.

wormie_sl said:

And that is why I was pissed at them. When I chose to ignore their notice it did not mean I accepted shit. It meant I am ignoring their shitty letter and nothing else.

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Toyouit didn't mean you accepted anything. You had an open ended contract that can be canceled by either side with 30 days notice. They weren't canceling your health insurance; they were updating you to a new plan that complied with the federal law. If your landlord tells you they're raising rent in 60 days, you don't need to sign a new contract or give them a letter or verbal acceptance. You not giving them your 30 day notice is considered your acceptance.

This is all really simple and probably happens to you a dozen times a year when you get updated terms and conditions, rate changes, and coverage changes from your credit cards, gym, ISP, power company, cell phone, etc. The contract you accepted when you signed up says they can make changes at any time as long as they give you notice, which they did.

Disp_sl said:

Toyouit didn't mean you accepted anything. You had an open ended contract that can be canceled by either side with 30 days notice. They weren't canceling your health insurance; they were updating you to a new plan that complied with the federal law. If your landlord tells you they're raising rent in 60 days, you don't need to sign a new contract or give them a letter or verbal acceptance. You not giving them your 30 day notice is considered your acceptance.

This is all really simple and probably happens to you a dozen times a year when you get updated terms and conditions, rate changes, and coverage changes from your credit cards, gym, ISP, power company, cell phone, etc. The contract you accepted when you signed up says they can make changes at any time as long as they give you notice, which they did.

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Mostly correct - but do remember that part of the new system that's been in place since 2011 (I think that was the start date at least) is that the insurers are required to report to each other on who has what policy. (It's basically the groundwork for central medical records should it ever happen)

So the insurers could get that information easily enough to verify if you went with a new policy if they cared to make the effort to. Likely what they're doing will be prevented in the future - since they do have a means to check for the past few years unlike the other examples which they're currently treated similarly to that do not have a means of verifying "replaced membership" - in some means, likely new policies will start getting a "Would you like us to inform your old carrier you'd like to discontinue your policy with them?" check off just like they currently often have a "Do you wish this policy to be primary or secondary insurance?" buried deep in the forms. [Since it's basically a new answer to the same question that could be done with the systems that exist now]

Although technically, there might be one hangup with that theorem of it being "correct" and that is under most types of contract law there are limits to how much of a rate change can be assumed without getting a response consenting - I find it hard to believe some of the 200-300% increases are within that tolerance. As someone becoming a landlord soon myself (keeping the house as a rental after I move to FL) - beyond a [I think? I was spacing out a bit talking to my accountant about it while gathering the gist of "make sure you pad it quite a bit in case the market comes back because it gets annoying to fix the prices more than the amount"] 8% rate increase annually I'll need to actually get a response verbally or in writing consenting to the rate change.

Well that's the thing; there is no box to click telling them to inform the prior insurance company you'll be canceling, and I can't imagine there will be any time in the near future. I can pull up a current and prior auto insurance report with just a drivers license and date of birth. What I can't do is assume someone wants one insurer over the other if there are multiple companies listed unless I get something in writing from the client. The insurance companies have this information too, but they're not going to say "oh looks like Johnny picked up a new policy with X, guess we should cancel the policy he has with us". They're going to continue charging him until he tells them not to, but they will backdate the cancellation if he can show proof he purchased a policy to replace it.

Anthem did the same thing to me a decade ago. We no longer offer your 0 deductible plan, here's our recommended Fuck You plan that we're switching you to, but if you want a different plan contact us blah blah. Thanks, Obama.

Disp_sl said:

Well that's the thing; there is no box to click telling them to inform the prior insurance company you'll be canceling, and I can't imagine there will be any time in the near future. I can pull up a current and prior auto insurance report with just a drivers license and date of birth. What I can't do is assume someone wants one insurer over the other if there are multiple companies listed unless I get something in writing from the client. The insurance companies have this information too, but they're not going to say "oh looks like Johnny picked up a new policy with X, guess we should cancel the policy he has with us". They're going to continue charging him until he tells them not to, but they will backdate the cancellation if he can show proof he purchased a policy to replace it.

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Which is why I said you're mostly correct - the framework is there to fix it.

The % change might be a legitimate means to question it's legality - since there might be a limit on how much they're allowed to adjust the cost without direct contact. Not sure what the limits (if there are any) for health insurance would be, but if there are any 200+% probably would qualify.