HealthyConcerns.com

More on insurance companies and prescriptions

Got some interesting emails in response to my allergies pot, one of which was a link to this story on The Consumerist about good ol' United Health Care and their aversion to paying for needed prescriptions. In this story there were no OTC or generic equivalents available, so they just refused to pay for the prescription in full.

If you read the many comments on the post you'll find that UHC isn't the only one, and that this is happening with essential prescriptions of all kinds.

Would seem to me that the potential costs from a medical emergency caused by a patient not taking their full prescription would far outstrip the costs of the prescription, but hey, what do I know?

What I do know is that insurance has always been based on the idea that we all pay, but that we don't all cost a lot, so the insurance companies make out OK.

Just take a look at UHC's 3rd quarter results [PDF]:

UNITEDHEALTH GROUP REPORTS RECORD THIRD QUARTER NET EARNINGS OF $0.79 PER SHARE • Third Quarter Revenues Rose 55% to $18 Billion • Operating Margin Reached 10.3% • Reported Operating Cash Flows were $315 Million; Adjusted Operating Cash Flows of $1.83 Billion Increased 121% (1) • Earnings Per Share Increased 30% MINNEAPOLIS (October 19, 2006) – UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) achieved record results in the third quarter of 2006. Diversified business growth was well-matched with effective cost management, advances in the integration of acquisitions and accelerating gains in profitability from seasonally strong product offerings in the third quarter, leading to a further advance in the Company’s full-year earnings outlook. UnitedHealth Group now expects full-year earnings per share growth of at least 25 percent in 2006.

Like I've said before: when are the congressional hearings?

When Allergies Attack!!

I have been known to diss Claritin, or its equivalent, the daily pill I take to ward off allergies. I have been known to think that it's not doing much for me anymore, and that I really ought to go back to an allergist, now that I'm on Kaiser, and not that cheap-ass United Health Care that wouldn't cover any prescription allergy medication for me as long as Claritin was available OTC.

Now, it still may be true that another medication would do more for me, I was reminded yesterday that Claritin does something for me...

Is this a surprise? Emotional support has physical results

Been meaning to point to this NY Times article from a couple of weeks ago about new discoveries they're making into how supportive relationships can affect us physically.

A positive example:

"Physical suffering aside, a healing presence can relieve emotional suffering. A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."

An alternate negative example:

"But as all too many people with severe chronic diseases know, loved ones can disappear, leaving them to bear their difficulties in lonely isolation. Social rejection activates the very zones of the brain that generate, among other things, the sting of physical pain. Matthew D. Lieberman and Naomi Eisenberg of U.C.L.A. (writing in a chapter in “Social Neuroscience: People Thinking About People,” M.I.T. Press, 2005) have proposed that the brain’s pain centers may have taken on a hypersensitivity to social banishment because exclusion was a death sentence in human prehistory. They note that in many languages the words that describe a “broken heart” from rejection borrow the lexicon of physical hurt.

So when the people who care about a patient fail to show up, it may be a double blow: the pain of rejection and the deprivation of the benefits of loving contact. Sheldon Cohen, a psychologist at Carnegie-Mellon University who studies the effects of personal connections on health, emphasizes that a hospital patient’s family and friends help just by visiting, whether or not they quite know what to say."

But seriously, does any of this surprise you? Don't get me wrong, though, I think it's very cool that they're discovering actual physical evidence. (Described thusly: "The most significant finding was the discovery of “mirror neurons,” a widely dispersed class of brain cells that operate like neural WiFi. Mirror neurons track the emotional flow, movement and even intentions of the person we are with, and replicate this sensed state in our own brain by stirring in our brain the same areas active in the other person.")

I'm just not surprised by it.

Here's the little twist I immediately thought of: People are always saying they believe one's own attitude can have a lot to do with how well or how sick we are. This always has the risk of taking on a blame-the-victim undertone. In other words: If you only had a better attitude. yo wouldn't die from cancer. Which can't be helpful.

With this new scientific validation of how our loved ones and their emotional states can benefit us if we're sick we can move straight on over to blaming our loved ones! If you had only done a better job of tending to me and had a better emotional state...then I would be better!

Mwa-ha-ha.

When is a freckle not a freckle?

That is what I've been wondering over the last few days.

I've always had freckles. A light smattering. And yes they've always come out more when I get sun...which really isn't something I set out to do.

I've noticed over the last few years that the freckles on my face have really become more splotchy than freckly. While I don't seem to be getting any age spots at all on my hands (unlike my younger sister who is quite annoyed that she has them while I don't) my freckles seem to have crossed a line into that age spot look.

Which bugs me from a vanity point of view, but not really enough to even ever use the "lightening" serum I bought from Sephora on a whim a couple of years ago.

But I have one splotch that's a little different. For one thing, it's slightly raised. I think it always was, because I think I thought it was a bug bite for a while when I first noticed it. But it hasn't really gone away like a bug bite would.

So now I'm thinking I may actually have to go have it checked out :(

Oh, and PS: my mom has gotten things on her face that have to be removed...although I don't think she was as young as my age when that started. I guess I should also ask her about that.

Now for your viewing pleasure: an actual extreme close-up of my own cheek, taken with flash, so everything looks quite garish. Can you spot the spot I'm worried about? I'm sure you can:

A post from Fleaa about my childhood ailment...which has a name I never heard of

My parents were lucky because none of us kids were plagued with any particular health problems. Probably my brother's worst issue was acne. All three of us had poor eyesight. We all got chicken pox...my brother and I quite young, my sister at a slightly older age. That was about it.

None of us had braces. None of us broke bones (until my brother chipped his knee when he was in his late teens.) None of us suffered much more than the usual childhood bouts with ear infections and strep throat and hay fever.

I did have one strange little thing that only happened when I was quite young...younger than school age...and only happened a few times that I know of: I would dislocate my elbow doing fairly normal things. According to family lore the first time happened when I was still a baby and rolled over in my crib. Then one other time I remember was when I was getting a piggy-back ride. The ridee was holding my hands and bouncing me along, and one elbow just popped right out.

Each time they took me to the doctor and they manually popped the elbow back in. I'm unclear on whether they eventually taught my parents how to do it themselves, although thinking about it more I think I've heard my mom say she learned how.

Eventually it stopped happening, and I have never had any discernible problems with my elbows as an older child or an adult. I suppose it's also possible that I don't exactly do things that are going to risk yanking my elbow out.

Anyway, today Dr. Flea, a pediatrician BlogBuddy has a post about talking a parent through fixing a dislocated elbow over the phone.

He also calls it something I've never heard: Nursemaid's Elbow. And when looking at the URL he provides I notice they don't even cite "dislocated elbow", which is what my family always called it, as a synonym or related term.

Always interesting to learn real, live facts about those misty memories of childhood conditions :)