Editor,
The University’s health plans, as well as its prescription plan, are becoming a rip-off as the companies that back them choke us for every cent that we have in the form of high deductibles and co-payments.
Furthermore, these so-called health plans won’t let us, their customers, choose the kind of alternative health care or “compound” medications that we want — even if those treatments end up costing them less money.
Instead, the University health plans have the audacity to tell us how to take care of our bodies and make us choose our doctors from their own proprietary lists of approved practitioners and medicines. Meanwhile, whatever good doctors remain within our health plans are becoming increasingly vocal about their lack of adequate compensation and some of them are refusing to take insurance at all and leaving the system, insisting that we pay them up-front in cash.
I bet everybody who reads my words has a story to tell about the way they were told “no” to their preferred treatment because their health insurance company felt it was too experimental or non-traditional.
UNM needs to offer some sort of low-cost, affordable catastrophic health insurance plan that only covers life-or-death scenarios and they need to offer it to us in lieu of what we’ve got going now because the present plan is a racket, plain and simple.
Sincerely,
Chuck Reuben
UNM staff
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