Of all the legal trades surrounding financial stuff, Debt Collectors can be about as scummy as they come. In our modern consumer driven economy these are the bottom feeders that follow around the predatory lenders, credit card bankruptcies, uninsured sick people, etc…
So I hope Senator Brown is proud of their work. They are bragging about their role in his success:
ACA International and its members played an important role in Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) stunning win in the Massachusetts special election to succeed the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).
ACA Immediate Past President Jay Gonsalves and fellow New England Collectors Association member David Sands reached out to ACA members and mobilized them to contribute approximately $11,000 to the Brown campaign to assist with its get-out-the-vote efforts. Not only did members send money, but many agencies offered use of their phones as an in-kind contribution to the campaign.
This kind of ACA member mobilization just days before an election is unprecedented. With the very real threat of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency looming in Congress, as well as wholesale changes to a health care system that would affect many credit and collection professionals’ livelihoods, ACA members helped the Brown campaign create a groundswell to victory. [Emphasis mine]
Ya’ gotta love it when when a professional organization is proud of their work to make sure people continue to have trouble paying their bills.
Rather disgusting.
(Article via Buzzflash & Cross-posted at gregroach.blogspot.com)
This is the core of a great campaign commercial! “Hey little guy — are you on the same side as the jerks who call you during dinner looking for payment?”
During the final days of the camapaign I received a series of GOTV calls from Cosmo Boy henchmen. To my surprise I found it came not from his campaign office but from a mortgage company named
Avantgarde Mortgage – Telephone number 781 – 444-0200. It is located at 945 Great Plain Avenue Needham ( oddly close to Channel 5 where Scott Brown’s wife, Gail Huff works).
I read the Republican Plan they have on their website, which, I believe, was put up in November of last year. Their plan really does nothing for the average consumer, except stop from being dropped and not having a limit on health coverage, which is in the Democratic bills. And the bill does nothing to cover the millions that are uninsured or underinsured.
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p>The whole idea of going across State lines to sell insurance is rubbish, forget that the Republicans are supposed to be for State’s rights. Each of the big 5 insurance companies have a presence in almost every State. Allowing them to do away with their subsidiaries would result in cost savings for the companies, but will they pass it on to customers? And they will incorporate in the State that has the least amount of rules, like the credit card companies.
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p>I can live with some form of tort reform, but it cannot be some lowball number that I read floating around. As reports already stated, tort reform would save the insurance companies 1-2%. Again, will they pass this on to their customers?
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p>The Democrats Senate bill is a mess and does not address lots of issues. If we really want reform, then we either go to a single payer or regulate the insurance industry, including plan pricing. We should really be looking at what other countries have done and stop moving forward with blinders on.
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p>I have been working at one of the big 5 insurance companies for the past 3 years. They have outsourced over 50% of their workforce to India on their way to 75%. It is an insult to Americans to have a person in another country making decisions, some which are life and death. And the company I have been working at has been making record profits. My friends tell me it is only 5% or so profit, but how much profit can be put on the health of a people? Meanwhile they are raising rates every year above the cost of living. As one of my colleagues put it, “by the time you reach mid forties, the company wants you to die.” That’s because there is a shrinking amount of profit made from someone in their mid forties and very little in their mid fifties and none after that.
“The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They’re the kind of people who’d stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn’t bother to stop because they’d want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club.” —Dave Barry
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p>Why is it wrong to have someone want to get paid the money owed to them? If I borrowed $1,000 from you and then I refused to pay you back, would I suddenly turn “scummy” by asking you to meet your “obligation”? How about every business in the world, probably many that you all work for, who have “acounts Receivable”? They are the “internal” “Debt Collectors” that uou are characterizing as SCUMMY? These people work in YOUR company to make sure your customers are paying their bills so you can get a paycheck. If they don’t do their job, your paycheck bounces.
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p>ACA International and its members played an important role in Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) stunning win
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p>$11,000 contribution played a “significant role”? Are you serious?
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p>I would say THESE are significant contributions!
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p>BTW… how does the recent SCOTUS ruling compare to what these unions spent on Martha?
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link
I have to object to your characterization of people like me as “refusing to pay” any of my medical bills. What happens is, after an illness, I get innundated with multiple confusing bills from various labs and hospitals and then collection agencies that may or may not be the final amount I owe, and I may or may not have paid already, and I get confused and annoyed and end up blowing an afternoon having to make long cell-phone crushing phone calls to figure out who I need to pay, and for what.
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p>I never refused to pay anything, and if my insurance company simply paid everything and then told me what I owed, and assured me that I wasn’t paying for anything twice or paying for anything extra, I’d happily pay them.
getting billed for tings that clearly didn’t happen, and then the medical codes changing, and then changing again, so it’s not at all clear what actions were performed and which weren’t.
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p>I was once billed for surgery when I broke a bone. The doctor’s entire visit was
* look at X-ray
* decide it was broken
* touch it with fingers for 1 minute
* refer me to a different office for a custom cast.
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p>Billed me for surgery. WTF?
You should start a diary because I think this is a great illustration of our biggest problem with healthcare costs. It isn’t insurance companies, it is the bills from Doctors and hospitals. We need to reform these costs significant;y AND he current healthcare reform bill does NOT address ANY of this!
because fewer mistakes would lead to more payments being correct and on time, and fewer going to collectors.
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p>Furthermore, once it goes to collection, it’s that much harder to straighten it out.
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p>So yeah, it’s a stretch, but not entirely unrelated methinks.
How about a little reform on billing practices between hospitals, Doctors, patients and insurance companies. I think you could get 60 votes for that!
My proposal is that the insurance company pay all the bills 100%, and then they bill us for what they didn’t cover. So nothing would ever go to a collection agency, and labs and hospitals wouldn’t have to worry about unpaid bills, they’d get paid in full right away. Is there a problem with this plan, one that can’t be fixed with some shifting of tax dollars or something? Seems to me the only problem is the loss of jobs for all the collectors and billing personnel, which isn’t a problem if you ask me, it’s a bonus to get cars off the roads.
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p>Why don’t we see if we can take something from problem to proposal and all the way through to changing the system? It seems like this is the blog of “ehh”, whenever anyone has a an actual idea.
There are a few things to explore:
1. Co-pays. Often I have to give $20 (or whatever) at the time of service. Would you keep this or bill this through insurance?
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p>2. In the case of very large bills, it isn’t the case that there’s never collection; if a person just doesn’t pay back the insurance company, the insurer would then (a) drop coverage and (b) send ’em to collections to recover the cost.
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p>Maybe this idea could just be done when overall procedure is under a set amount; I imagine most medical procedures are under $5000 (think dentist appointments, simple doctor appointments, etc), and in that case there’s far less chance of the patient dropping insurance and trying to avoid paying the insurer back. If this makes things simpler for 90% of all transactions, it’s well worth it. Insurers won’t like it as it is, but you really don’t want to create situations where the insurance company also has to chase down big bills. Setting a cap also allows a phase in period (first year everything under $1k, next year everything under 2k, etc… to give the insurance company a chance to get on its feet and work out the kinds)
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p>3. Currently, if the insurer doesn’t cover what the patient thinks it ought to, the patient has to fight it out with the insurer, and in the mean time the medical provider is in the “out” until the patient pays (and then the patient is in the “out”). Under your proposal, the insurer is in the “out” until the patient settles and the medical provider is almost never in the “out” (except when the insurer refuses payment, and I expect those can be worked out quickly and would be rare).
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p>4. What about insurance through the government? What would the gov’t do when the medicare/medicaid/SCHIP/VA patient doesn’t pay back the gov’t insurance company? It’s true that the gov’t has more efficient repo skills than collections agencies, but it’s a bit trickier for Uncle Sam to repo someone’s car/house/whatevs to pay for surgery as opposed to a private faceless agency.
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p>5. I wonder: could this be done at a state level? Since 97% of MA citizens are insured, this is the best test-bed (along with HI and LA perhaps — they too have different systems than most of America). While not all care provided by MA hospitals is to people insured by MA companies and not all MA citizens are getting care in MA, this would cover a huge majority of the cases.
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p>6. One problem is that the patient doesn’t have to look hard at the bill until after the insurance has paid for it… and perhaps paid too much because the medical provider over-billed. I suppose if the patient discovers it, the insurance can fight it out with the medical provider while in the “out”… I suspect it’s a small percentage relative to float.
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p>One of the tough parts is the float itself. Currently, the insurance company is paying for things that happened 3 months ago, so to speak, because of the lags in the billing. If the insurer pays everything and then has to collect, not only does it have to make up that 3 month lag immediately but then it also has to essentially be “ahead” 3 months while it waits for people to start paying for the procedures. Methinks the only way to get the insurers there is for the Feds (or perhaps the state) to give them a bridge loan — loan them a bunch of cash at a very low interest rate, and let the insurance company pay it back in the span of a few years, while they swing from lagging to leading in the cash flow.
1) Co-pays should be billed by the insurance company to the patient, and doctors offices should stop having to take co-pays or deal with any direct patient billing.
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p>2) The phase in period for larger bills probably wouldn’t work, because hospitals would then figure out ways to break bills up into two smaller bills so they could get them both paid by the insurance company.
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p>If a patient has a procedure done which is he has not decided to pay for insurance coverage for, like he has emergency heart transplant surgery using genetically engineered pig stem cells or something, then who should be on the hook? The hospital, the government, or the patient? I don’t think the hospital and the drug companies should be guaranteed to be paid by the government or insurers immediately for everything they decide to do. For many expensive procedures, they should just not provide that service. The overall mortality rate would not be affected. They should be able to tell what is covered by a patient’s plan and not do those things. (Which means, they should be able to tell if the patient has decided to purchase any supplemental insurance to cover certain procedures which are not covered by a federally mandated minimum plan which everyone gets automatically paid for by the government, directly to the insurers.)
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p>3) Yeah, the insurer would be on the out and the provider would never be on the out. Is that bad? Is the fear that they’d start doing extra stuff because they get paid for it so easily, without the possibility that the customer won’t pay serving as a brake on how much extra medicine they provide? Wouldn’t they be able to save so much money from worrying about billing, and writing off unpaid bills, that they would be able to lower costs significantly?
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p>4) So, are we resigned to the fact that people should have to pay for their surgery by selling their car if they have to? Someone that requires expensive medicine should have to give up expensive cars, and healthy people should be rewarded with more cars and better living? Isn’t health a reward in itself?
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p>5) Portions of it could be tried at a state level, and the administration could be done at a state level. But since we are citizens of the many states, and it really should be done at the citizen level.
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p>6) Patients could be rewarded for finding fraud or mistakes in their bill, maybe triple the amount they find, giving them an even bigger incentive to find fraud.
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p>Yeah, the float would probably require an infusion from the government, or maybe just a tax break for a while (do insurers pay taxes?)
to answering your first question. Certainly debt collection is a legitimate business, but far too often it is practiced in shameless ways.
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p>Secondly, none of the your citations have issued a newsletter bragging that keeping people in debt and on the hook for medical expenses would positively affect their “livelihoods.”
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p>You can disagree with unions, insurance companies, BigPhamara etc…, but to have the legal equivalent to Rocky Babloa’s original part-time job say that healthcare reform should be opposed because there will be fewer thumbs to break is absolutely reprehensible.
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p>based on the story you linked to above? The only thing they said was this effort was…
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p>Where do you get your “leap” from?
What part of that is unclear?
Well, after a couple weeks in DC he’ll learn from his peers on both sides of the aisle how to beg, roll-over, heel and sit for bigger treats.
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p>“Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair.” –George Burns
Nice find Greg. Let’s eliminate that industry.
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p>Now I understand why the insurance companies don’t simply bill me for what they don’t cover, so I can simply pay one bill and not have to deal with all these separate bills that come in piecemeal and I can’t tell if I’ve already paid them or if they are the final amount. Then I start getting random mail from random companies and I’m supposed to notice and just send a check to anybody that sends a bill to me? And then I get a worse credit score, which makes banks more money but also discourages me from borrowing an therefore from purchasing. The post office also probably lobbies for this system, and the credit score people, and the computer companies and phone companies.
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p>I think my insurance company should just bill me for the portion that my premium doesn’t cover, and pay the hospital and doctors and labs the full amount. And we should eliminate those backroom secret negotiated rates and make providers charge the same rate for all patients.
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The insurance companies hate it more than you do.
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p>The hospitals have balkanized their care – separate legal entities are doctors, lab, x-ray, etc. My understanding is that it is a liability avoidance dodge – making a malpractice suit be filed against 5 providers for a single instance, so they can all cross sue and subrogate against each other, and NOBODY is really at fault.
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p>Of course, 99 percent of the time, there IS no malpractice, just a lot of dead trees from the confetti of bills.
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p>In addition to needless CYA tests, put this down as another piece of fallout from the failure of tort reform.
should be to get all of the bills that I generate from all the various labs and doctors and hospitals, and simply pay them, instead of paying part of them and making the labs then have to bill for the difference. They should make sure I’m not being billed for the same thing twice, pay all the bills, and then just tell me how much I owe them. So I’d get one bill, my monthly premium plus whatever they aren’t covering. How hard would that be? What’s the downside of that, besides all the people that would lose their jobs.
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p>You may be right, (fractionally), but I can think of loads of other reasons to balkanize care facilities, including:
* taxation (some parts for-profit, some not-for)
* employee status (some employees, others contractors)
* research and grant (those bits in a different bucket than regular treatment, so to speak)
* partnerships with other wholly-separate entities
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p>Without some really good citations, forgive me for frankly not believing your flippant “tort reform!!!1!one1!juan!11” knee jerk reaction.
of a while back seemed to indicate that extra care was the result of medicine becoming less of a profession and more of a business. The article, here, is very much worth reading on the issue of health care costs.
The hospital sends a bill. The insurance company takes its time deciding what portion of the bill it will pay. Then it sends out a list of the things it will pay for and sends payment to the hospital. Then the hospital sends out another bill listing the payments the insurance company decided to cover. All of this paperwork has to be scrutinized by the patient to figure out if it is correct. This is often not easily discerned because of all the codes and footnotes.
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p>This procedure is repeated for every service billed from other sources – e.g., anesthesia, radiology, etc. – although the actual care may have been received as part of the hospital visit.
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p>So when you finally go through all this paper – and you find something that seems off – you have to call everyone to track down the problem. In my case, the insurance company once sent the hospital payment to the wrong address and another time had failed to cover a routine mammogram.
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p>How efficient. Is this the “best health care system in the world” we hear so much about from Republicans? And what’s wrong with this picture that Medicaid for All on a sliding scale wouldn’t fix? At the very least, standardized forms for all private insurance companies and billing providers should be mandated.
with a bad billing system, let’s fix the billing system.
Please
First, she’s discussing the wasteful billing system, then suddenly the answer is “Medicaid for All”? Not sure what that even means, but it’s a showstopper.
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p>It is possible to change the billing system without making fundamental changes. But it seems no one wants that, people just want to use fixable problems and flaws as reasons to make their desired fundamental changes.
Rather than look at the existing system to see where we could improve it, they took the approach of rewriting the entire plan which scared the heck out of mainstream America.
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p>I think we could have had (and maybe still have) improvements in…
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p>- Customer billing.
– Combining customer medical records.
– Treatment options.
– Examination and control of “COSTS” of services which was never discussed.
– Prescription plans OR cooperation with Pharma to limit pricing on drugs.
– Creating a network of Health or Medical centers (staffed by subsidized Medical professionals).
– Legit scams (ever had Physical Therapy?)
Check out the last 20 responses he has written to me AND the last 50+ ratings (all ZEROS). Point is, it’s not worth trying to “defend” or reply to his remarks since they are totally Ad Hom attacks.
–JohnD
That Medicare (sorry, not medicaid) is an established, standardized system that could quickly be expanded. Rather than trying to design one from scratch.
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p>It was a bit of a jump.
I got a bill from Emergency Room Associates at Cape Cod Hospital. The hopsital has no doctors on staff anymore, just this sub-corp.
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p>I got a bill from Cape Cod Radiology Associates from their diagnostic radiology practice (aka doctor on duty in emergency room).
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p>And so on. I also got a bill from CCH for the use of the gurney.
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p>BUT THAT IS HOW THE INSURANCE COMPANY IS BILLED…not a portmanteau bill from CCH, but the same individual bills that you got. This is the pattern for out-patient care. Insurance pays for what they cover based on the bills received – if the HOSPITAL sent one bill, they’d do cartwheels. As it is, more and more hospitals are going to this subcontractor model for out-patient care.
and the hospital should decide how many radiologists and doctors and gurneys to have on staff, and they shouldn’t charge the patients at all, there should just be a top-down allocation of tax-payer money to the hospitals, and doctors should make the same amount whether they do three surgeries or thirty, and the patients and insurance companies shouldn’t have to know whether the surgeries required twelve tests or two specialists or what.
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p>But as long as we charge for each procedure piecemeal, why not have the insurance company simply pay all the bills they get, and then bill the patient for what it doesn’t cover? Sure, they’d have to pay out lots more money, and they’d be the ones that risked not getting paid by the patient, but couldn’t the tax-payer compensate them for that?
He raised 13M so we are talking .8%
.. are much more significant than the cash.
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p>The defacto cost of a professional call center, especially if your boss asks you to “volunteer”, is huge.
They helped Brown win. When my alma mater is building its president a $265,000 garage, higher education has too much money. The school eliminated the disability services department, and terminated four sociology professors. They made up the cost all right. So much for the teachers union.
When you have a globalized effort to remove Americans from their former lifestyles health care is merely just another symptom of the empires deliberate and by design decline.
Now that statement is Tea Party in it’s pure form.