The Insurance Scam
People, and companies, are paying for benefits that they rarely receive. A case in point: Acupuncture. I am a provider for three major companies, and for a host of smaller ‘providers’. Which is great, because they come to me through their directories. My negative experiences in attempting to ‘collect’ my fee up and above the co-pay, have both tainted my ability to go this route, and clarified for me one thing: Insurance Companies are perpetrating a racket.
They make it nearly impossible to collect on fees in a straight ahead manner, for services rendered. If anyone else has found this to be true, in the alternative field at least, I would love to hear your input on this. The entire process whereby one comes to an individual practitioner for treatment ought to be as easy Jay Leno’s prescription: Do work, get paid. But it’s never that simple. We are made to jump through hoops for a miserable $60-80 dollars. In the meantime, ‘pain and rehab clinics’ in Brooklyn, Queens, and up to the Bronx are basically money mills, attracting the welfare crew and giving nothing to the populace in return. How do I know? I subbed in one for a week, and the experience was both demoralizing and depressing. There I was, Mr. Innocent, thinking I was supposed to be helping people with their low back pain, neck pain, shoulder pain. Headaches, migraine, carpal tunnel…
Instead, patients would come in, lie down and say to me, “put one pin right there—“ motioning to a particular spot “— and don’t hurt me; I got a good lawyer and he’ll sue you.”
All righty then.
These same patients were, for the most part, under the aegis of an ambulance-chaser lawyer, who hooked up with a pain clinic and found their ‘car accident’ clients—many of them obese and with other health issues—all for the purpose of sucking money out of the system in any way they could. I have not a right wing bone in my body, but the way this situation has tainted the health ‘system,’ and therefore my work as well, is outrageous. Someone needs set in motion a way to infiltrate this corrupt anti-health care system and break it, similar in scope to the way the Mob has, finally, been weakened. Billions are being lost to unscrupulous doctors, lawyers and businessmen-crooks—while honest practitioners, men and women who are trying to do the ‘right thing’, are just getting by. What is more, the people who truly need the services–the sick, the elderly, those in deep pain–are rarely getting the treatments they need. . And that’s the worst crime of all.
Rant off.
D. Reinaldo. Blue Phoenix