President Obama's understanding of the health services crisis is limited by his experience. He is not a poor man and he has no concerns of being able to afford coverage. Nor does he face the issue of coverage denial: Federal employees cannot be refused insurance coverage. But the rest of us can.
This huge disparity is the root of the problem, our governmental representatives have no skin in the game.
Take Florida for instance, where this past week John Dorschner of the Miami Herald reported that insurers are using data mining to specifically target individuals who take certain medications as unworthy of the ability to obtain health insurance. Companies like Vista, Medical Information Bureau, Millman's Intelliscript or Ingenix are helping insurers deny coverage to people with known ailments based on the drugs prescribed to such individuals.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/health/content/health/epaper/2009/03/29/0329meds_copy.html
President Obama's push for the use of technology reflects his own concerns, saving money on paperwork for Medicare, saving insurers dollars, and rewarding physicians financially for helping the government save money. But President Obama is not addressing reality.
These companies, first of all are not covered by HIPAA, so forget your privacy rights. Whether you believe such records should be private is not the issue when it comes to HIPAA, it is a waste of our tax dollars to have HIPAA in place at all. Claiming privacy is already available to consumers as long as they're willing to also accept that they'll have no insurance coverage. And this is what is being advised! People are being told to buy their meds for cash to avoid a paper trail of their ailments.
Data mining has often been presented to consumers as an ANONYMOUS report of prescribed medications to simply indicate how often specific medications are being prescribed. This story is noteworthy because it is personal.
As more "conditions" aren't covered based on the fact that a person has used a specific medication, these denials are simply another means that insurers use to avoid covering the sick.
But his refusal to examine reality will backfire for Obama because as more and more people become uninsurable, more and more people will finally realize that preventive screenings and checkups are useless when people can't afford TREATMENT for actual illness. There goes that little leg of his plan. And fining people for not having health insurance? He'll try it because life in the bubble makes that necessary, but in order to impose such a fine he has to make it so that everyone has the OPTION of buying health insurance which will also require COST considerations to avoid personal bankruptcies. As for insurance companies, they will miss out on the most lucrative aspect of their business: insuring the healthy.
President Obama is loving technology at the expense of reform. Supporting health technology is a choice and making that choice necessarily removes patient privacy rights. Therefore, HIPAA is pointless. Financing both when they cancel each other out is wasteful and unwise.
It's time for the government to lead by example, that is reform. Federal benefits or the growing number of federal civil servants MUST be similar to the choices other citizens face including increasing prices for less coverage, the ability to be DENIED coverage, and the risks of being permanently classified as uninsurable because a person is taking medication. It is a con to tell the American people to cope with something that civil servants need not face.
