Complaints about Iowa's privatized Medicaid are spiking

[Disir]

State quarterly reports show grievances and appeals filed with the three companies managing Iowa's Medicaid program have spiked by almost 270 percent — from 343 to 1,268 — in the latest three-month report published in March.

Kelli Todd, a manager of the Iowa Long-Term Care Ombudsman, said her office in March had its busiest month on record with concerns about the private companies' Medicaid practices, with 556 contacts. April’s level dropped to 448 contacts but remained high, she noted.

At the heart of the issue is Iowa's controversial decision to turn over management of its $4.2 billion annual Medicaid program to for-profit companies, an act the federal government delayed for three months last year after saying the state wasn’t ready for the transition.

Critics in 2015 warned that profits, not public health, would dominate decisions for the 568,000 poor or elderly Iowans on the program if private companies took control.
Complaints about Iowa's privatized Medicaid are spiking

Wow. You would think repeated fails would cause these nitwits to rethink the plan. Privatization does not work. Again.

 

[badger2]

Class-difference medicine we have experienced recently in Wisconsin. For comparing Kelly Tood's situation, there is a Fukushima model:

Fukushima Cancer / Social Isolation / Patient Delay
Social isolation and cancer management - advanced rectal cancer with patient delay following the 2011 triple disaster in Fukushima, Japan: a case r... - PubMed - NCBI

 

[badger2]

OP's Iowa report, the statement, "So trying to hide it would be foolish on our part," does not explain the details.

1.) No reader gets to find out the nature of any of these purported complaints.

2.) No reader can verify what happens to the patient when inside the medical installation, because the patients themselves cannot prove what happened to them. This arroqant medical mafia machine is working too, on the Wisconsin side of the Iowa line.

 

[dblack]

We're privatizing what we should be social and socializing what should be private.

 

[badger2]

That's a good point. In Wisconsin, online med learning is being advocated, though class-difference medicine going on now means that the non-elite sector will suffer from workers not clued up about current medicine nor their patients. The reason for the latter is because there are more non-elite patients to deal with, thereby causing a constriction in the time required to treat them vs. an elite patient. Caught in the double-bind of production medicine vs customized care, the med worker is pre-compromised. Today, the gaze is forensic, which means that the med worker must know more about (each [italics]) patient. Apart from extorsion, siphoning of funds, fraud, etc., that is the crucial problem.