A Doctor Whistle Blower tells all, working from within the medical profession for your rights and protection.
Download the Consumer Protection Healthcare Handbook (over 100 pages of detailed information to help you deal with your healthcare issues) online, through secured and encrypted transaction protocol.
Why you should be concerned about the Healthcare you receive from your HMO, Insurance Company and Doctor.
Everything you need to know about protecting your healthcare in one easy to read handbook. (Excerpts from the handbook are available here on the site)
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Sites on the web which Dr. A recommends to complement and supplement the information in the handbook.
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Why you should be concerned about the healthcare you receive from your physician, HMO, and Medical Insurance Plan!
- Think it can't happen to you?
- Six true healthcare horror stories, including the reasons they happened.
- What you don't know can hurt you!
- A list of scary HMO facts to be aware of before they become critical to your life.
- ...but you do have recourse.
- Some HMO facts to empower you
- In the end, you need more than raw facts.
- You need a game plan. That's where the Consumer Protection Healthcare Handbook comes in.
The following are some horror stories you need to know about:
A 32 year old woman, married with 3 children came down with breast cancer and her HMO denied her care that cost $150,000.00 which the HMO was obligated to pay for. This resulted in a delay of 6 months while her family and friends raised the money so she could go to another medical center to have the treatment. She later died and it was found out that the medical director of the HMO, who had no expertise in breast disease or cancer and was not a practicing physician, was being given bonus pay at the end of the year based on how much the HMO was profiting. It also came out that employees of the same HMO who had the same breast cancer received the treatment and payment from the HMO.
A young man with serious psychiatric problems was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Later the insurance company put pressure on his psychiatrist to discharge this unstable gentleman early, who later committed suicide. The physician reviewer for the insurance company who put the pressure on the psychiatrist was a physician student in neurology.
A young man who had bills of over $25,000.00 for medical care at a medical institution was told his insurance company would only pay $6,500.00, because the insurance company on its own felt the rest of the care was not medically appropriate. The family sued and the court found that the insurance company was making up its own standard of medical care and not relying on objective nationally acceptable medical standards in making its decisions.
A hospital was fined millions of dollars when a family sued because their family member was discharged too early from the hospital. The court found out that when the hospital discovered that the person's medical insurance was running out it pressured the patient's physician to discharge the patient early.
A patient who had HMO medical plan did not receive the proper cancer treatment from the patient's cancer doctor, because the University Medical Center pressured the doctor not to do so. The medical center was allegedly getting pressure from the patient's big HMO that it did not want to pay for the treatment and threatened the hospital that if it allowed the treatment, the company would transfer all patients under their plan to another hospital.
A young man died of an acute heart attack after a nurse on an HMO telephone "help line" refused his wife's request to take him to the nearest emergency room.
There are no guarantees. However, if you have the necessary knowledge before a healthcare crisis, you can minimize the chances of such a horror story happening to you.