FOUL PLAY
Insurance company mistreatment
Giving bonuses to employees for canceling people's insurance contracts after they get sick or pregnant.
$35.5 million. That's how much Health Net, a California-based insurance company, saved by dropping 1,600 enrollees when they most needed health care.
Health Net "set goals and paid bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped and how much money was saved."
The company "paid its senior analyst in charge of cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed [in 2007] showed."
—"Health insurer tied bonuses to dropping sick policyholders," Los Angeles Times, By Lisa Girion, November 9, 2007
Don't think for a minute this is just "one bad apple!"
- "Anthem Blue Cross (then Blue Cross of California) asked doctors to help them cancel patients coverage."
—Blue Cross Halts Letters Amid Furor," Los Angeles Times, By Lisa Girion and Jordan Rau, February 13, 2008 - "In August of 2005, Heidi Bleazard said she suffered a mountain bike accident in which she fractured her neck, sustained a brain injury, and broke three ribs. "Several hours of neurosurgery were performed to save my spine." Her medical bills topped $100,000, Bleazard said..."Then, in a letter dated Jan. 17, 2006, Regence notified Keith and I that they were rescinding our health insurance policy retroactively."
—Utah Couple Testifies Before Congress on Insurance Nightmare, The Commonwealth Fund, July 21, 2008 - "According to the insurance industry's own estimate, thousands of similar rescission investigations into policy holders occur every year, and most of them lose all their coverage as a result... "These incidents are hardly isolated and random -- they are part of a pattern, a prevalent practice in this industry," Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said."
—Battling Blinding Disease and Insurance Company, ABC News, June 18, 2007
Read more in the "Foul Play" Archive.
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