Who does your GP work for?

It’s amazing how times have changed.  When I was a child, our family doctor actually made house calls.  Now, when you call the doctor’s office to make an appointment, you spend alot of time just trying to get someone to answer the phone.  The  primary reason for this is that your family doctor and their supporting staff no longer work for your benefit — they work for the health insurance companies - gratis.  

What makes this even more galling is the fact that the insurance companies keep raising insurance premiums while claiming that it costs them more and more to operate.  I don’t understand how they put forth such a ridiculous proposition when they dump most of their work on the primary care physicians.  Primary care physicians do not make any money filling out and processing “referrals”.  This is just a ploy by the insurance companies to use these “referals” as and excuse to not pay a claim.  If they actually provided the referals themselves, then they would not be able to deny the claim.  But hey, what do they care,  it costs money to pay the claim — heaven forbid they would have to do that.  Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking this current system is anything more than a fraudulent scam by insurance companies to pass off all their costs onto others while “claiming” higher costs. 

On reason the costs are higher than they should be is due to the amount of reprocessing that occurs with regard to insurance claims.  How many times have you spent hours on the phone with insurance company customer “service” (I use that term lightly)  representatives getting a claim reprocessed because the insurance company did not receive the “correct” information even though the procedure was pre-authorized and processed according to the instructions in the “referral”.  That is where the costs are frivously wasted — your premiums at work.