Protest in D.C. today

If you're in Washington, D.C., today, check out this protest against the insurance industry. Activists plan to "arrest" health insurance execs who are there for a meeting, and hold a rally afterward.

The idea behind the event, according to Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), is "to expose the high crimes and misdemeanors perpetuated by the insurance industry time after time and year after year, and we are totally sick of it. We're going to crash their party and put an end to its injustice."

I'm with you in spirit!

A health insurer gets its comeuppance

in this story, sent by a friend, about a judge who ordered punitive damages for an insurance company that dropped a breast cancer patient in the middle of chemotherapy.

I'm particularly obsessed with health insurance stories right now, having just heard that our family would not make it through medical underwriting now because our daughter had anorexia. This story has nothing to do with food, eating, or eating disorders, but it's just so damn gratifying to see a health insurance company get called on one of its many out-and-out exploitative practices.

I'm always amazed at how self-serving these companies are--and how they get away with it. So yay! for the good guys. And a big thank you to judge Sam Cianchetti, who did the Right Thing and who I hope will be rewarded for his good judgment somewhere, sometime.

Now if we could just send the CEOs of companies like Health Net to jail for doing stuff like this, I'd be a happy girl.

Not just docked but dumped

As a follow-up to my earlier post about being docked for being overweight, now it turns out you can be turned down for health insurance altogether, as reported in this article from the weekly alternative newspaper in my town. And wouldn't ya know it--my new employer's health insurer is Humana. (And so far they, um, are living up to their reputation.)

Mental health parity

Here in Wisconsin, we don't have mental health parity, a fact I often moan about. If only we had it, I often thought during my daughter's recovery, we would be able to get the treatment we need for anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders.

Parents in New Jersey, where there is mental health parity, found that insurers still discriminated against e.d. treatment, denying and disqualifying it in the face of medical advice. Dawn Beye is one parent who got sick and tired of waiting for her insurer to do the right thing and cover her daughter's treatment; she and other parents filed a class action lawsuit to have anorexia classified as a "biologically based illness." Apparently insurers in New Jersey differentiate between biologically based mental illnesses (depression, etc) and non-biologically based mental illnesses.

I guess they think anorexia is all in our heads. They ought to read NAMI's stance on this, not to mention the opinions of many other clinicians and professionals. But then we all know that health insurers know more than doctors when it comes treatment protocols and appropriateness. Right?

When I rule the world, we'll have national health insurance (which goes without saying). And that national health will cover evidence-based treatment for eating disorders, plus support families using the Maudsley method and other approaches yet to be discovered for helping their children recover from e.d.s.

Beye's daughter is still in-patient after 10 months. Beye and her husband still don't know how they're going to pay for her treatment. They could wind up owing several hundred thousand dollars if Aetna doesn't do the right thing and cover the IP treatment.

As my grandmother would have said, it's a shanda. And if you don't know what that means, look it up in Leo Rosten.