Central South Dakota | Honestly I've always thought that the hospital/clinics should be the ones providing the healthcare plans.
If nothing else it should eliminate an unnecessary layer of billing.
Your looking at that all wrong IMHO Kookier. You don't want your hospital being your insurance company, you want your hospital providing healthcare. Once your hospital is your insurance provider, you are no longer a patient, you are only looked at as a revenue stream to be maximized.
A true insurance company could care two craps where any of us receive our healthcare as long as it is cheap and you receive quality care results so they do not have to pay more claims thus maximizing the premium dollar received from you.
On the other hand, what incentive does a hospital have to stay competitive, decrease costs through competition, maintain the best doctors or facilities if as a patient, you are stuck going to their facilities and to only doctors they hire because they limit your access to healthcare through your insurance plan because they can make the out of network costs so high that you couldn't afford to go elsewhere. Have a billing disagreement, your hospital person turns around in their desk to talk to the insurance person behind them at the hospital and your problem is denied.
I guess MHO is that a hospital should focus on being a hospital and patient care and an insurance company can focus on writing policies that lower costs by getting as many hospitals competing in their network as possible. IMHO patient care will suffer and costs will continue to skyrocket if every hospital is also your insurance company.
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