Insurance Company Drops Vet Over 2-Cent Shortage

[sufrommich]

THORNTON, Colo. -- Two pennies. That's the difference between a potentially life-saving surgery, and a dropped insurance plan.

Those two cents could cost Vietnam veteran Ronald Flanagan everything.

"Everybody we talk to is very surprised that two cents is enough to do this," said Flanagan.
was an innocent enough mistake, according to Ron's wife, Frances Flanagan.

"If I only had just hit the nine instead of the seven," Frances said.

When she was paying their monthly health insurance premium online in November, Frances swapped a 7 for a 9, leaving their $328.69 payment two cents short.

"And now we're just pulling teeth and trying to figure out what's the next step," Frances said.

Their insurance company, Ceridian Cobra Services, based in St. Petersburg, Florida, promptly dropped the Flanagans for the two-cent shortage.

The couple only found out about losing their coverage at a doctor's appointment on Jan. 13. They found out about the problem while at the Exempla Rock Creek Medical Center in Broomfield.

As Ron was getting prepped to have a bone biopsy, Frances was on the phone with the insurance company.

"The nurses were just getting ready to do the biopsy when my wife popped into the office and told them, 'Stop. We don't have any insurance,'" said Ron.

"And that's when they let me know that we no longer had insurance on account of the two cents, and they canceled us," said Frances. "Since then, I've been depressed. I haven't been able to hardly do anything. As you can see, we still have our Christmas decorations up. So it's been hard on me."

Ron has been fighting cancer since September 2008. He has multiple myeloma -- cancer in the bone marrow. Doctors at St. Luke's have performed stem cell transplant surgery twice. He needs another transplant before the end of February, and they have a donor. But, because of the two-cent mistake, Ceridian Cobra Services will not pay for the procedure.

In a statement to 7NEWS the insurance company said, "We did not receive a full and timely payment and (Mrs. Flanagan) was provided several notices of the shortage and a grace period reminder notice on the last invoice, along with extended grace dates as provided for under COBRA regulations."

The statement goes on to say, "Since the payment was not full, it fit into the definition in the regulations of an 'insufficient payment' ... Ceridian understands nothing is more important than one’s health ... Unfortunately, we simply do not have the capacity to be able to personally call continuants and remind them of the status of their COBRA benefits."

Ron Flanagan believes Ceridian does not value human health, but rather -- the bottom line.


http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/26614998/detail.html

I hope this sick insurance company loses a lot of customers over this.

[stockholmer]

1. this is the price paid for the American way,just tragic you have rapacious profit-driven health care

[chill_wind]

2. Two cents?

Surely there's a special place in hell for such absurd minded bean counters.

[sufrommich]

3. I'm guessing the adjuster poured over the contract looking for

a way to stop paying for this vet's cancer treatments. I'll bet he got a lot of attaboys for finding this little discrepancy.

[chill_wind]

4. That occurred to me too.

Bean counters is a description far too polite.

[SoCalDem]

5. and if he was a Canadian, he would live

or if he was any one of a number of other nationalities that are NOT American:(

How many people die every year because of a geographical birthplace "error"?

[area51]

6. 'How many people die every year because of a geographical birthplace "error"?'

According to this website, 100,000 people die due to lack of health care in the U.S. per year.

"Any proposal that sticks with our current dependence on for-profit private insurers ... will not be sustainable. And the new law will not get us to universal coverage ...." -- T.R. Reid, The Healing of America

[saras]

7. Bean-counting is just labor...

I knew one of those bean-counters. He wasn't terribly well paid, but it was a 'real' job, and he was really happy to have found a job that he could do from home, because his wife was disabled. I suppose you'd have to call that ironic.

He worked on a computer, supplied by the company, that he couldn't do anything else on but play solitaire occasionally. He 'processed' applications and payments all day, and basically his job was to look for anything wrong, and flag it, so that someone else could decide what to do. The software he used also looked for problems, but didn't tell him - he had to find them himself. I think it was the company's way of checking his work.

No, he didn't deny his wife coverage. Or at least, not knowingly. The names didn't show up in his software, as he didn't need to know them. No, he was just a poor schmuck ticking off 'not full payment', 'doctor approval missing', 'social security number doesn't match', or whatever other problem appeared on his screen.

My guess would be that the worker who cut off the plan because the payment was incomplete had no idea whether it was two cents short or whether the check bounced.