Letter: Modern healthcare is dangerously overcomplicated

Editor,

There are out-of-network doctors, especially radiologists and anesthesiologists, billing huge amounts directly to consumers for services provided, where the patient is literally unconscious when it comes to which provider is providing what, like in the O.R. This can happen with the most cover-all insurance plan you think you may have gotten.

It is like sand shifting under an already sick or injured patient’s feet to learn that the reason they got this or that bill is because a certain doctor who was formerly in-network went out of network, especially when the lines around a network are changing as a result of deals and counter-deals in that most dangerous of casinos: Wall Street.

The above is just one way all kinds of companies (which include one-person, for-profit corporations called doctor practices) are circumventing the intent of the word “affordable” in the Affordable Care Act. They get to do so because of the complex and distributed shape-shifting taking place in the healthcare world, with insurance mergers and acquisitions and consolidations, along with a plethora of splitting and splicing and dicing of corresponding for-profit “groups” and holding companies, which can seem remote to the patient until you get stuck holding a bill specifically in your name.

But by then you are so confused and intimidated by the gobbledygook of arcane terminology and cryptic renderings in your bill from this or that healthcare cabal, and so overwhelmed with a barrage of unrecognizable “bills” (is it a bill or just a statement?), that you just knuckle under and pay up, with the wool thus pulled over your eyes, and you are always learning of this and that after the fact of treatment; Or half of us Americans file for bankruptcy.

Where is this headed? Obamacare becomes so complicated with so many moving parts going into gridlock, it collapses under the weight of its own transactional and organizational complexity and by becoming weaker from underfunding, because huge amounts of patient-care money are getting siphoned off to exploiters such as clinical social workers, not to mention the phalanx of government customer service employees working overtime to keep abreast of the latest alterations from still more shenanigans by money-sucking leeches called insurance brokers looking for every little loophole through which to deny coverage even on Cadillac plans, their mouths puckering over, even patients on deathbeds.

Sincerely,

Arun Ahuja

UNM student