Letter to the Editor: EMSA defended
BY Bob Dupree, Tulsa
Sunday, May 06, 2012
5/06/12 at 2:49 AM
Ho hum! Isn't it time to move on to a different topic? As a reader, I have watched the Tulsa World waste mountains of newsprint attacking one of the few institutions we have that works well. Either quit messing with it before you do us more harm or report the whole story. I have provided some facts below to get you started:
You glossed over a statement by an EMSA spokeswoman that said: "Out of more than 500,000 patient transports over the past three years, EMSA has filed suit against less than 1 percent of patients. These suits are not mishandled. They are legitimate claims resulting from violations of the TotalCare program." (I suspect that the number of actual billing errors by EMSA is quite small by comparison or you would have used that evidence against EMSA. Instead, you moved on to anecdotal evidence, which, by its nature, further obscures the facts.)
The following are from the AMA's National Health Insurer Report Card Error Rate applying contracted fee schedule:
Aetna, 19.88 percent
Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, 20.72 percent
CIGNA Corp., 20.02 percent
Coventry Health Care, 16.77 percent
Health Care Service Corporation (added in 2010), 6.12 percent
Humana, Inc., 11.27 percent
UnitedHealth Group, 24.75 percent
Medicare, 2.03 percent
(Source: http://www.AMA.COM)
Now this is a calamity. Where is the outrage?
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