insurance
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Always misspelled that way, of course. ↩︎
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All numbers are fictional for storytelling purposes. ↩︎
One of our credit card companies, acting as “Californians for Medical Privacy”, is opposing CA’s AB 2746. They say:
Lenders could need to know what medical services you received, if they were “medically necessary”, and potentially, even your private treatment details, if AB 2746 (Schiavo) were to become law.
Liars.
California’s existing law basically says that you can’t use a person’s medical debt against them when making credit decisions. Someone getting sick and racking up an enormous medical bill because their insurer denied, defended, and deposed, is not something they could have reasonably foreseen and avoided. It’s a different category of debt than, say, maxing out your credit cards in Las Vegas.
The new changes would clarify and expand the definition of “medical debt” in reasonable ways. The members of Californians for Medical Privacy claim they’d need to know why you borrowed money on a credit card to pay a hospital bill. While it’s not completely wrong, it’s a flashback to COVID times when people said dumb things like “I’m not allowed to tell you whether I have a fever because of HIPPA1” to avoid getting kicked out of a bar for having the plague.
See, if you’re allowed to tell them that you charged $10,000 to pay an emergency room to fix a broken arm, then they can’t hold that against you when you apply for a mortgage. They’d much rather hold your future in their greedy little hands while you sell your car to pay for a root canal. Their explanation of the law is probably more or less correct. Their claims about the implications of it to us, the residents of California, the patients, and the borrowers, are complete lies.
I didn’t know about AB 2746 until our credit card — which we’re closing today — told us about it. And now that I know what it is, and the lies lenders will tell to oppose it, they’ve convinced me to be in favor of it.
The icing on the cake was their email footer:
ABOUT THIS EMAIL: This email was sent by [lender] to provide important account servicing information regarding your [lender] account. You may receive account servicing emails even if you have requested not to receive marketing offers by email for your [lender] account.
This was an political astroturfing campaign, not an “account servicing email”.
Again: Liars.
Today I learned that our $6000-per-month UnitedHealthcare “platinum” insurance doesn’t fully cover generic thyroid medication, so our monthly cost for them rose from $1 per month under Aetna to $59 per month under UHC.
This is what the Republicans’ “death panels” look like.
UnitedHealthcare sued by shareholders over reaction to CEO’s killing
The group, which seeks unspecified damages, argues that the public backlash prevented the company from pursuing “the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics that it would need to achieve” its earnings goals.
The investors actually said that. They demand UHC be more “aggressive, anti-consumer” to make more money for them, presumably by killing more Americans.
It’s time to start building the guillotines.
Because my ex-employer pays for a “platinum plan” health insurance policy, with family premiums of like $6000 per month, when I had a routine medical procedure last week, my out of pocket expense was “only” about $2000.
‘Murica. Shit yeah.
I fought State Farm (and won)
State Farm claimed we owed them money. I said we didn’t. They pursued it. I countered. They ended up owing us money instead.
My wife’s small business purchased our unemployment insurance through State Farm until we sold the company a couple years ago. Unemployment insurance premiums are proportional to your payroll: you pay the insurer a certain percentage of each dollar you pay your employees. When you cancel a policy, you reconcile your payroll numbers with them to settle up one last time.
State Farm said they estimated we’d been paying our employees $100,000 a year1. Therefore, by their reckoning, we owed them another $1,000 in additional premiums as if we’d paid out $100,000 in payroll that final year, even though we sold the business in May. They sent me an audit form to complete if we wanted to use our true numbers instead of their estimate. I submitted their form and promptly forgot all about it.
6 months later I got an email from our insurance agent saying that we still owed State Farm $1,000. I replied that we did not and that they needed to recompute our supposed debt using the real numbers that I’d submitted to the audit.
We had the same interaction about 6 months later, then again another 6 months after that. State Farm claimed they’d sent us all the information in writing. We found that they’d been sending letters to the old office that we’d lost access to on the day we sold the business, and the new owner never bothered forwarding them to us. Regardless, I wasn’t about to pay them the $1,000.
I got a more urgent email from our agent toward the end of last year. State Farm wanted their money and were turning our account over to a bill collector if we didn’t pay it. I replied and made our position clear: if State Farm would put it in writing that they had computed our amount due based on our real payroll numbers, and if they mailed that to us at our current home address and not the old business address we weren’t at anymore, only then would I pay them.
Again, silence.
A couple months ago I got a call from a bill collector. He was OK to talk to. I told him his customer was smoking crack and he laughed. Then I repeated our demands: I wanted State Farm to give us an itemized invoice showing their accurate calculations, and I wanted it sent to our house. I promised him that if both happened, I’d cheerfully make arrangements to pay the invoice in full immediately. He said that was reasonable. We parted ways.
However, I’d run out of patience. I filed a formal complaint with California’s Department of Insurance explaining our side of the conversation, asking them to rule on our behalf, and loading them with evidence proving our argument.
2 weeks later, the Department of Insurance replied saying that we needed to appeal the dispute through State Farm’s internal process before involving the state. Their letter contained details about the precise person we needed to contact and the legal jargon to use.
I did that. I got a response from that person yesterday. Their letter contained the itemized calculations I’d asked for all along, a final ruling that State Farm owes us $200, and a promise to mail a refund check to our correct address by the end of the week.
It took 2 years for State Farm to straighten out their math. They could have offered to write off our “debt” a year ago and stop pestering us. I would have accepted that. Instead, they kept it up and lost.
Yay me!
If that check isn’t here in the next few days, I have the number of a bill collector I might hire.