| To my amazement, some insurance companies insist that patients try methylphenidate or amphetamines before they will pay for modafinil, even though these drugs can have much more serious side effects. Modafinil is not yet on the list of drugs the FDA has approved for use in chronic fatigue syndrome or idiopathic chronic fatigue (ICF), although it's approved for other purposes. Not allowing a person to take this drug is clearly backward thinking, but insurers also don't cooperate because modafinil is more expensive than stimulants that have been on the market for many decades. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And while the American people get sicker, the drug companies, insurance companies and many health "care" providers (it's really more like "sick care providers") are rolling in cash. Drug companies are now among the richest corporations in the world, and they got there by inventing fictitious diseases, then selling drugs to people who mostly don't need them. See my CounterThink cartoon, Disease Mongers, Inc. to learn more about this topic.
Meanwhile, the American people are the most diseased people in the world among advanced nations. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Doctors are buried under insurance paperwork (which takes up about 70% - 80% of the staff at a given clinic or hospital), insurance companies play the "we won't pay" game with everybody, and the people end up paying for insurance that won't cover them when they need it anyway. This whole situation creates stress and worry for everyone, and it results in the needless deaths of individuals who are denied lifesaving medical procedures simply because their insurance won't pay. Want a picture of how the industry really operates? Just watch the behavior of the Dr. |
| The campaign will highlight the need for reforms that prevent insurance companies from denying care, and send a strong signal to politicians in Congress, state capitals, and the presidential race who are promoting insurance-based reforms.
HR 676 and similar bills in several state legislatures would have one public entity collecting and disbursing all revenues for care delivered by our current, mostly private hospitals, clinics, and doctors, similar to how Medicare works. The system is universal, assures comprehensive benefits, guarantees freedom to choose your provider, and controls costs. |
| America's current system of medicine has clearly abandoned the needs of its people while protecting the profits of influential corporations who run health care today (Big Pharma, insurance companies, hospitals and so on). The end result of all this is now becoming obvious: A collapse of America's health and wealth. Our future is looking increasingly like a future of rampant disease and widespread medical bankruptcy. But it's not too late to stop this from happening. Adopting universal health care now could save us from the national health care disaster now brewing. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Buy in bulk. Some insurance companies allow people to get a three-month supply of medication for a single copayment when they order from Internet pharmacies, cutting costs by 67%.
Patients can also save by buying up to a year's supply at a time.
Example: One man ordered a year's supply of the thyroid hormone levothyroxine. He skipped his insurance company entirely—and still saved $80.
In addition, some pharmacies offer free shipping on big orders.
•Pick a company that has a "live" pharmacist. Avoid any Internet pharmacies that don't provide customer support. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| Wireless companies are also protected in that insurance companies will not pay out for illnesses caused by prolonged low frequency radiation exposure! I think we should be asking, what is so special about cellular service providers that they should be permitted to continuously market harmful products while simultaneously being protected from prosecution under established law? That's like committing murder legally with no repercussion.
Well, as usual, there's another radiation culprit to consider. The antennae on top of cellular base towers emit RF radiation at extremely high power. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 Though expensive (about $300), it decreases the incidence of the xiber-painful condition of shingles. Some insurance companies may reimburse for this shot. Check with your insurance provider, and if it's covered, ask for the insurance code and provide it to your doctor—you may find this number makes it easier for all.
4. Pneumovax: for people over fifty. Repeat at sixty-five years old (if five years since first one). Used to prevent the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia in adults.
5. Influenza: yearly. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 At that time, opposition to universal coverage came largely from private life insurance companies, which had begun to market health insurance too. Many physicians supported government-provided insurance at first, until they realized that the Progressives didn't want simply to insure citizens; they intended to encourage doctors to form prepaid, group practices, modeled after early HMOs like the Mayo Clinic. |
Devra Davis
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 Because the profitability of insurance companies depended on what illnesses they had to pay for, they had a major interest in monitoring reports of work-related health problems. They did not do so with entirely benign intent. Lanza presented a highly skewed rendering of Pedley's work: the Quebec asbestos workers, he claimed, were unique. They had no evidence of asbestosis.7
By 1935, despite such suppression and manipulation, the literature on the harms of asbestos in workers was vast. A Pennsylvania state report listed over 125 references from all over the world. |
| We know of many instances where insurance companies tracked health hazards for years, as claims mounted and reports of various ailments accumulated, without letting workers know the dangers they faced. We also know that current laws discourage giving such information up. The federal Toxic Substances Control Act provides criminal penalties for anyone who has knowledge that someone endangers public health or the environment and does not report it. The result is that most companies no longer develop such knowledge or collect such information, so that they can't be charged with breaking this law. |
Dr. Arthur Janov
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 It is used mostly by insurance companies as shorthand codes for reimbursement. Almost every different type of behavior has its own diagnostic category. In short, diagnosis and payment are based on behavior, not feeling. Our diagnostic approach is internal, not external; it depends on what level of consciousness the patient operates on, the kind of access she has to lower levels of consciousness, and how much intrusion from subconscious imprints there is because there is a melange of lower levels of consciousness that puts the patient at risk of being overhwlmed by lower-level pain. |
| They tell us what drugs work and we use them. The insurance companies won't pay for us to delve into the patient's history, to take our time to find out about her. They pay for immediate results. The conclusion: we develop new therapeutic theories to accommodate the idolatry of the here-and-now intellectual, drug approach. We have ceded our integrity for pay. We don't do it consciously, but we don't feed our families if we don't accommodate the new reality. |
| And this, by the way, is what the new ego-psychology, the darling of the insurance companies, is about. The here-and-now is what counts and what must be discussed, and must be accomplished in very few sessions. Forget incest, orphanages, broken homes, and alcoholic mothers. These are all reflected in internal states—memories that cannot be seen directly.
The problem is that the cognitivists see reaction in terms of "mind" reaction, not as a total physiologic response. So when we are beaten by a tyrannical father throughout our childhood, is it just how we see it—the ideas we have about it? |
Charles Barber
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 So the most recent diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association is happy to provide any number of diagnoses of disorders (with accompanying billing codes) that are patently not for mental illnesses at all, but sound just clinical enough to satisfy the insurance companies. For practitioners unwilling to slap Julie with major depression, there are any number of alternatives. |
Ray D. Strand
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 Physicians and insurance companies have placed all their hopes in drugs as the way to approach and hopefully slow down this epidemic of chronic degenerative disease—much to the delight of the pharmaceutical industry. Yes—we love our drugs.
I have not met a person yet who does not want to have excellent health. Most of us assume that we always will. But the truth is that many of us (doctors included!) are losing our health each day. I know, because health care is my job. Every day of my career involves informing patients that they have lost their health in one aspect or another. |
Shannon Brownlee
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| Patients paid a yearly premium, just like with indemnity plans, but unlike traditional insurance companies, HMOs did not give their doctors and hospitals free rein to decide what patients needed. Instead, HMOs set yearly budgets for their clinics and hospitals. Within those budgets, the doctors set priorities for how best to maintain the health of the population of patients for whom they were responsible. |
Bottom Line Health
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| Most Internet pharmacies work with a limited number of insurance companies. Some bill the insurers directly.. .others do not.
You can find this information on the pharmacy Web sites or you can call your insurance company to find out which, if any, Internet pharmacies are part of its network.
•Figure in extra costs. Some Internet pharmacies offer free shipping for standard ground delivery. This usually takes two weeks, so order well in advance. Fees for overnight delivery can be high.
A few Internet pharmacies, such as AARP's, charge patients annual membership fees. |
Brenda Watson and Leonard Smith
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 Unfortunately, because medicine and its delivery is largely a reactive industry driven by huge insurance companies that wait until you get sick before allowing coverage to kick in, we've grown accustomed to being reactive patients. We wait until we get sick to seek solutions to our health problems.
As this book reiterates throughout, the natural approach to health and healing is attuned with the body, working with it rather than against it. This was the philosophy of many traditional remedies that have now been lost or replaced. |
Roberta Bivins
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 Moreover, such professionals want access to the kinds of resources poured (by governments, insurance companies, industry and charitable foundations) into orthodox medicine: funding for research, for education, and for services to patients less or unable to pay. On the other side of the equation, both cost and consumer demand are encouraging the entities that foot the healthcare bills to look closely at alternative forms of medical provision. |
Michael T. Murray
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 The reason is probably difficulties with reimbursement from insurance companies. Although the insulin used in the pen is slightly more expensive, because the needles for the pen are slightly less expensive than disposable syringes the price evens out. Eventually the insurance companies will figure it out and insulin pens will be as popular here as they are elsewhere in the world.
Use of an insulin pen or pump requires the user to recognize factors that may cause a change in their blood sugar levels (see Table 8.3).
Table 8.3. |
Charles Barber
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| Data mining companies like Dendrite International, Verispan, and IMS Health buy this information from pharmacies, pharmacy benefits managers, and insurance companies. Dendrite, for example, purchases information on 150 million prescriptions every month and currently has a database of 5 billion prescriptions. This data is sold to pharmaceutical manufacturers, who distribute doctor-by-doctor prescriber reports to their detailers. Prescriber reports allow detailers to target doctors and adjust sales pitches until they find the ones that work best. |
Andreas Moritz
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 Health insurance companies and their clients could greatly benefit from the liver and gallbladder cleanse in several important ways. These companies would be able to lower their premium rates and expenditures considerably, while the insured population would enjoy much better health, fewer sick days from work, and freedom from the fear and pain that typically accompany disease. Older generations would no longer be considered a burden, as they would be able to take care of themselves more and more rather than less and less. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 We must ask why. insurance companies say environmental medicine is experimental and anecdotal. If we take two hours taking a history and do extensive patient or parent teaching to show them how to figure out answers so they can finally detect what's causing the problem, on a long-term basis, it is time well spent. That individual stands a chance of remaining well and not needing drugs or hospitalization once the true cause has been identified and eliminated. |
| For some addicts, acupuncture helps, and a few enlightened medical insurance companies are beginning to cover it. In Oregon, heroin addicts must try acupuncture before getting methadone.
The "last frontier" in recognizing how addictive a society we are comes in the attention being paid to substance abuse among the elderly. It is now estimated that 2.5 million older adults have alcohol-related problems, often missed by physicians who mistake symptoms like falling or gastritis for problems associated with aging. |
| Once you get a label, you are locked into it. insurance companies cover certain treatments—usually drugs only—and they penalize or will not pay patients for having looked for the causes, even though they got back to work, got well, got off drugs. They will pay for several $800 MRIs, disability for being unable to work, and at least $100 a month for drugs. There is no rhyme or reason. There is no rationality. We've lost that a long time ago. So people have to take the ball in their court and find out what is wrong with them and then when they get well, to fight for their rights. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 Question your doctors, other health-care providers, insurance companies, your senators, and your Congresspeople. Become a vigorous participant in your own health and don't just mindlessly follow "doctor's orders." We have a lot more control over our health and well-being than we've been led to believe. Taking the reins of our own well-being brings us one step closer to unraveling a healthcare status quo that has not been serving us well. |
Melody Petersen
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 With insurance companies quick to pay for antidepressant prescriptions, but often unwilling to pay for more expensive talk therapy, the drug companies easily found hundreds of new customers through these campus screenings, which have been performed across the country. In 2002 Wyeth, the maker of the antidepressant Effexor, hired Cara Kahn, the twenty-three-year-old star of the MTV show Real World Chicago, to urge college kids to be screened. Those working with the actress put up posters to attract students with slogans like "Stressed? Come find out how much" and "Come test your mood. |
| Physicians don't take the time to find out what is bothering the child, she said, because that is not what insurance companies pay them to do. "I don't get paid for forty minutes of talking," she said. "Instead, I get paid for a fifteen-minute examination, enough time to prescribe an antidepressant."
Dr. Collins is not the only physician in the state to be shaken by the rising number of psychiatric drugs taken by Iowa's children.
"We're seeing kids on three, four, five, six drugs," said Dr. Jeffrey Lobas, the director of fourteen clinics in Iowa that specialize in children's health. |
| One had to look beyond those copays to the actual cost of the prescriptions paid by insurance companies, government programs, and the uninsured to understand the burden created by the industry's practice of unrestrained pricing.
Iowans paid more for the medicines they picked up at the drugstore in 2004 than for all the items they purchased at clothing stores, shoe stores, furniture stores, sporting goods stores, bookstores, jewelry stores, hobby stores, and toy stores combined. The nearly $2 billion that Iowans spent on prescriptions filled at pharmacies was approaching the $2. |
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