Healthcare bills lack protections against treatment denials, experts say
Source: Los Angeles Times
Despite growing frustration with the way health insurers deny medical treatments, major healthcare bills pending in Congress would give patients little new power to challenge those sometimes life-and-death decisions.
""Right now, the deck is stacked against patients,"" said Bryan Liang, director of the Institute of Health Law Studies at California Western Law School in San Diego. ""Healthcare reform is not going to change the ball game.""
Yet a patient's ability to fight insurers' coverage decisions could be more important than ever because Congress, in promoting cost containment and price competition, may actually add to the pressure on insurers to deny requests for treatment.
By requiring insurers to cover everyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions, healthcare reform will make it more difficult for insurers to control their costs, or ""bend the cost curve,"" by avoiding sick people.
That leaves insurers with the other big cost-containment tool: turning down requests to cover treatments.
Read the full text of the Los Angeles Times story.
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