Tag Archives: health insurance

Lower Health Insurance Fees

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U.S. doctors are dumping all health insurance and charging patients LESS

Thursday, June 20, 2013 by: Lance Devon

(NaturalNews) In some places across the US, high-cost health insurance coverage is being discarded altogether. The looming Affordable Care Act health insurance mandate seems to be inspiring constructive disobedience. Yes, doctors are now “outsmarting” this government mandated health care system and moving towards a cash only system. This is leading to more affordable, expansive care for many – as the red tape is eliminated. Quality, affordable health care will return to America, not through blind compliance to mandates, but from those who completely defy the health insurance system altogether. As doctors move toward a much simpler system, they can charge less and also spend more time caring about their patients instead of dealing with unneeded paperwork.

Kansas physician cuts through the red tape

This is exactly what’s happening in Wichita, Kansas. The red tape is being cut down. This Kansas family physician, Doug Nunamaker, says he is now offering higher quality health care at a fraction of the cost after abandoning the entire money-bloated insurance system. He now effectively cuts overhead costs and charges his patients a small monthly fee, reducing medical service costs across the board.

Tired of all the red tape and insurance paperwork over the last five years, 32-year old Nunamaker decided to simplify his practice. Noticing how wasteful the system really was, Nunamaker realized that he paid an entire staff to manage health insurance red tape. By ditching this system, Nunamaker has been able to lower costs to patients and spend more time actually caring for them.
Most of Nunamaker’s clients are self employed, small business owners. These patients are now testifying that a small monthly fee to Nunamaker’s office is much more affordable than modern day health insurance plans (which are set to be mandated on Americans in 2014).

A more efficient route based on personal choice

Nunamaker also recommends to his patients that they opt to carry a high deductible health insurance plan to cover extreme emergencies that may require hospitalization. This option, coupled with Nunamer’s monthly fee, continues to be much more affordable than buying into current health insurance packages.

With much simpler options on the table, Nunamaker presents a more efficient way for Americans to be covered in case of an emergency and also providing inexpensive access to a wide variety of care.

In this way, healthy people aren’t forced to pay for another person’s poor lifestyle choices (like under Obamacare).

Nunamaker’s way also prevents a select few from feeling “entitled” to free healthcare. Everyone who chooses to participate pays a reasonable fair share based on age. Under Obamacare, nearly everyone, whether they choose or not, pays for everyone’s universal medical expenses, necessary and unnecessary.

Nunamaker working with colleagues to provide expansive network of affordable care

Under the Nunamaker’s basic membership plan, patients pay a flat monthly fee based on age that allows them to access unlimited “direct primary care” from medical providers that work at his practice.

For example, pediatric services are accessible for only $10 a month. Adults up to age 44 only pay $50 a month. Anyone over 44 pays only $100 a month. This cash only method, which also encompasses credit and debit transactions, is bypassing hours of wasted time, bloated prices, and red tape. It effectively goes around the new “Affordable Care Act” and actually offers affordable care. For example, a basic cholesterol test only costs his patients $3, compared to a typical $90 charge brought on by an insurance company.

Nunamaker is also working with professionals outside his office to create a network of coverage that includes services he cannot provide. He and a colleague have already got the price of an MRI down to $400, compared to what they were charging through insurance companies – around $2,000.

Obamacare requires all Americans to pay for the stupid decisions of others, like “walking into a lamppost”

As this Wichita family physician cuts through red tape, the Affordable Care Act is poised to add more new red tape to health care, which includes 122,000 new health codes. These codes include absurdities like “injuries sustained from a turtle,” or “injuries sustained from walking into a lamppost.”

As Americans are forced to pay for absurd medical decisions and even ones that go against their personal beliefs, many doctors across the US will have the option to defy Obamacare, giving Americans individual liberty to choose the medical services and health care they deem appropriate for themselves.

As more red tape befalls America, the best doctors will lead with integrity and show some guts, adopting a more responsible form of health care. The US can move back toward a much simpler, less expensive form of healthcare. A government mandated system that caters to pharmaceutical companies is destroying true healthcare.

from:    http://www.naturalnews.com/040873_doctors_health_insurance_patient_fees.html

2011’s Health & Happiness Lessons

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Top 10 Health & Happiness Lessons of 2011

Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 31 December 2011 Time: 09:28 AM ET

Skiing at Snowmass, CO.
Outdoorsy Colorado remained the slimmest state in America in 2011.
CREDIT: Marcin Moryc, Shutterstock

A lengthy job search promotes worry, stress and anger, but a bad job is worse for happiness than no job at all.

Those findings are on the Gallup polling agency’s list of most compelling findings about health and happiness in 2011. The agency queries tens of thousands of Americans every year about their health, well-being and happiness. The resulting Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is a day-by-day measurement of America’s mental state. Here’s what Gallup’s editors say intrigued them the most this year:

1. Long job searches are bad for well-being

The longer Americans search for jobs, the unhappier they are with their lives, according to a Gallup poll analysis released in February. Only 34 percent of unemployed Americans who had been looking for work for at least 11 weeks said they were “thriving” in life, compared with 47 percent of those who had been looking for 10 weeks or less. Sending out more job applications with no luck had a similar effect: Half of people who had sent out fewer than 10 applications said they were thriving, compared with 32 percent of those who had sent out more.

2. More Americans now normal-weight than overweight

For the first time in three years, more Americans qualified as “normal weight” than “overweight,” according to poll data released in October. That poll found 36.6 percent of Americans had a body mass index (BMI) placing them in the “normal” category, compared with 35.8 percent who were classified as overweight.

Still, 25.8 percent of Americans qualified for the more severe condition of being obese, defined by a BMI of 30 or higher. BMI is calculated using weight and height. That meant the majority of Americans – 61.6  percent –  are still in weight ranges that put them at higher risk for health problems such as heart disease, diabetes and cancer. [8 Reasons Our Waistlines Are Expanding]

3. Fewer young adults go without health insurance

A growing number of young Americans had health coverage in 2011, thanks to a provision in the Affordable Care Act that allows children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26. Since that rule went into effect in 2010, Gallup found, the number of uninsured 18- to 25-year-olds without insurance dropped by 3.8 percentage points, to 24.2 percent.

However, the proportion of 26- to 64-year-olds without insurance increased over the same time period, from 18.1 percent to 19.9 percent. Overall, the survey found, 17.4 percent of Americans lacked health insurance in the second quarter of 2011.

4. Colorado is America’s skinniest state

An August Gallup report revealed that Colorado, with an obesity rate of 20.1 percent, remains the skinniest of the states. West Virginia had the heftiest population, with 34.3 percent of its people obese. That’s the highest rate Gallup has measured since it began obesity tracking in 2008.

Although Colorado is relatively svelte today, its current population would be the fattest in America if the state were to travel back in time 20 years. In 1991, not a single state reported an obesity rate of more than 20 percent.

5. Americans struggle to afford food

Obesity rates aside, Americans actually had a harder time affording food and other basic necessities in 2011 than in recent years. When asked if they always had enough money to buy food in the last year, 79.8 percent of Americans said yes, the lowest number since November 2008. At that time, the start of the economic crisis, 79.4 percent of Americans said they never struggled to afford groceries.

The reasons for these patterns is not entirely clear, Gallup reported in November.

6. “Suffering” holds steady

Four percent of Americans said in September that their lives were so bad that they were “suffering,” a number that has held steady for 2½ years. That’s one of the lowest rates in the world, Gallup reported in October. Perhaps unsurprisingly, income and suffering were correlated, with people making less than $24,000 a year about six times more likely to describe themselves as suffering as those with incomes over $90,000 a year.

7. Employers are offering less health coverage

Employer-based health insurance is on the decline in America, with only 44.5 percent of Americans getting health coverage through work in the third quarter of 2011. That percentage has been on a steady decline since Gallup began tracking health insurance numbers in 2008, when the rate was 49.8 percent. There has been a simultaneous increase in the number of Americans getting their health insurance from the government (up to 25.1 percent from 22.9 percent) as well as an increase in people without any insurance at all (up to 17.3 percent from 14.6 percent).

8. Americans caring for each other

While working a day job, one in six Americans also acts as a caregiver for an elderly or disabled family member, Gallup reported in July. The caregiver job was most prevalent in the 45- to 64-year-old age demographic, with 22 percent of people in that group reporting caregiving responsibilities. Women were more likely to be caregivers for a needy relative than men were, 20 percent to 16 percent.

9. Bad health costs $153 billion a year

Weight-related health issues and other chronic problems cause American workers to miss an estimated 450 million days of work more each year than normally healthy workers, Gallup reported in October. That absenteeism costs more than $153 billion in lost productivity annually.

Normal-weight workers without chronic health conditions experience about 4 days a year when health interferes with their normal activities. Workers who are overweight and obese with one or two chronic conditions average 13 “unhealthy” days a year, while overweight or obese workers with three or more chronic conditions report 42 unhealthy days annually.

Workers do not take all of these “unhealthy” days as sick days, but Gallup researchers calculated that workers miss about one day of work for every three unhealthy days they experience.

10. A bad job is worse than no job

Workers who are emotionally disengaged from their jobs view their lives more negatively than workers who have no job at all, Gallup reported in March. Forty-two percent of the people who said they felt disconnected from their work and workplaces described themselves as “thriving” in life, compared with 48 percent of the unemployed. Workers who were happily engaged and enthusiastic with work were happiest in life. Of that group, 71 percent said they were thriving.

from:    http://www.livescience.com/17695-10-health-happiness-lessons.html