In six months the new plan will stop insurance discrimination against lower waged employees.

The new plan will give aid to states that have offices for consumers to help them with complaints and appeals.

The new plan will in six months ban companies from lifetime caps and limits in coverage.

It will also extend coverage to children up to age 26 on their parents plans if they want to.

It will make sure that people have processes to go to when they do have problems or disagreements with their insurance companies.

It will ban co-payments for preventative care and use of deductibles for preventative care.

It will also restrict annual limits on coverage.

I got a couple of facts out of what I heard but not much, so I decided to look around the net and find the plan itself. I was going to read it line by line and then translate it to English.

I thought I did find it, but most of it was lawyer speak. You know, blah, blah, blah, and a little bit of truth or fact. OK I thought, maybe that’s all there is to it. Yet now I’m still reading articles in the news about it and or parts of it are still being debated.

So did anything get passed? If so what and where can we read about it?

This story is not exactly new. I wrote about this a couple months ago. It’s a shame that women are being told not to bother with breast cancer tests all for the matter of money. Of course to the insurance companies it’s more important to save some bucks than womens lives.

I’m not a doctor but if you were to ask me my advice would be to talk it over with your doctor and put yourself first. If you are in a high risk group get tested. I still think, no I know it would end up being less expensive to catch cancer and treat it early rather than to let it get to the advanced stage and try to treat it.

It’s named after a college student called Michelle Morse who died of colon cancer in 2005 and who remained a full time student to keep her insurance.

It’s a good law as I know first hand what a horror colon cancer can be and I can’t imagine having to go to classes till you are on your death bed. Kudos to her mom AnnMarie Morse and Rep. Paul Hodes.

When people complain and want their money back they often only get about half if even that and are told that the rest was an application fee. Two of these companies that are currently being sued are Home Health America and Consumer Health Benefits Association.

Do your research before you invest in such a company for your health insurance and as always, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.

About 47% said they simply didn’t find a plan that fit their needs, and another 36% said they couldn’t get insurance because of pre-existing conditions, or had conditions that insurance companies would not cover.

They also found that people who did buy individual plans ended up paying a lot more for premiums and deductables than those people who had insurance through their job.

The numbers are staggering, people with individual health care coverage paid an average of over $6,700 , whereas those who had insurance from work paid only$2,250.

People need to have health insurance that they can afford and will cover the conditions that they need covered. This all seems to so simple and yet will we ever get there?

They are on Obama and his administration to come up with some way that all Americans can have some form of insurance that they can afford and that can be used when they spot symtoms of illness.

I still think part of the answer is to have more nurse run clinics for the most simple and obvious illnesses. As a matter of fact, a lot of major diseases start with the simplest of conditions. Nutrition and obesity for example lead right to heart and diabetes which lead to many other conditions. Think about that.

First let me say I could be way out of line here but…here are the thoughts I have;

1. We live in the suburbs of Chicago, my folks live closer to the city than I do by about 15 miles.
2. The population of Chicago has been growing and changing for the last 20 years.
3. The city’s hospital which was known as Cook County may have superb doctors and care but it’s a pit. I know this as a fact since my daughter had to go to the ER there a few months ago. My kids witnessed drug deals being conducted there, a pigeon flying around the room and people just camping out there for somewhere to go. They said it was filthy and disgusting.
4. Because my parents live closer to the city, the population of Chicago is now in their area. Most are Mexican and I bet dollars to donuts that a great number of them do not have health insurance, and a fair amount of them are probably illegal. This is not a put down since I do not carry health insurance either because of cost. Since this population change they go to this hospital and the hospital has had to make changes to take in all these people. My parents waited over 11 hours last week for my mother to get a bed, and the only reason they got one then was because my father threatened just to take my mom back home.

So the theory is that the growing number of uninsured does not only effect the cost for everyone else but also the quality of care that they get, insurance or not. My parents have good insurance through my dads pension and I gather they cannot change their doctor, and their doctor works out of this overcrowded, overworked, hospital that is now trying to take care of twice as many people as they were meant to take care of. This possible future of health care for everyone should scare the you know what out of you, because I don’t see an end in sight. As weak as my father is, I wonder if he will survive the 2 or 3 months wait for the test. Any comments on this?

Unless I am not understanding correctly, this article seems to be saying that some doctors and a government committee feel that some cancers can live and grow in the body, but if you are older you will probably die of something else before the cancer really becomes a health concern for you.

It further seems to say that by detecting it early you would undergo treatments that would prove to be unnecessary because you’re going to die soon anyway. WHAT?

I don’t know about anyone else but I do not want cancerous tumors anywhere in my body whether they are causing me pain or not. These doctors seem to be saying that they are affecting the quality of life by treating and testing the cancer, rather than the cancer affecting the quality of life.

Of course I have to ask once again where do the insurance companies and money fit in to all this. After all look at how much can be saved if we just all forget about testing high risk groups of people for cancer, and even more money can be saved by ignoring it and not offering treatment.

Honestly, sometimes I feel like I woke up on the wrong planet. See the whole article here and throw me a comment, I’d love to know what you think about all this.

There are about 47 million uninsured in the United States.  The reports concludes that 11.4 million  Americans that have at least  one of seven major  illnesses  are not insured.  They broke it down to  16.1%  of 7.8 million with  heart  disease, 15.5 %  of 38.2 million with high blood pressure, and 16.6% of 8.5 million  diabetics. They also looked at other conditions  such as COPD, cancer, asthma, and high cholesterol.

6.2% of insured people did not have regular doctor visits compared to 26% of uninsured who also did not. 22% of the uninsured had not gone to see a doctor in the past year compared to 6.2% of insured. 1.1% of insured people used the ER as their source of care, compared to 7.1% of uninsured.

Doctors can become frustrated because they know that almost all these conditions can be managed with minimal complications if they were given the chance to treat them early and regularly.

It would seem to me that the answer lies in insuring the uninsured, or making health care and medicine competitive and possible at lower costs.