From Michael Hiltzik at the LA Times:
The industry loves to promote surveys indicating that most Americans are "satisfied" with their current health insurance -- 37% are "very satisfied" and 17% "extremely satisfied," according to one such study.Yet these figures are misleading. Most people are satisfied with their current insurance because most people never have a complex encounter with the health insurance bureaucracy. Medical care generally follows the so-called 80-20 statistical pattern -- 20% of patients consume 80% of care. If your typical encounter is an annual checkup or treatment of the kids' sniffles, or even a serious but routine condition such as a heart attack, your experience is probably satisfactory.
But it's on the margins where the challenges exist. Anyone whose condition is even slightly out of the ordinary knows the sinking feeling of entering health insurance hell -- pre-authorizations, denials, appeals, and days, weeks, even months wasted waiting for resolution.
And don't even try to switch plans, or you'll run into the Catch-22 situation I did.
If you have friends who don't understand all the hooha about reform, consider forwarding Hiltzik's column to them. Those of us who've been on the margins already know what he's talking about, but those in the middle probably don't.
Posted by Linkmeister at August 3, 2009 12:11 PM | TrackBack