| Nursing Home Malpractice Insurance Void Reported in Oklahoma
A Tulsa-based consumer group says many Oklahoma nursing homes appear to be operating without malpractice insurance. Hugh M. Robert, executive director of the Oklahoma Center for Consumer & Patient Safety, says the lack of insurance often leaves families with no legal recourse if a nursing home patient suffers serious neglect or abuse. Robert told a Capitol news conference some nursing homes are operated by shell companies that have no assets and no insurance. He called for enactment of a Senate-passed bill to require nursing homes to carry insurance. Becky Moore, executive director of the Oklahoma Association of Health Care providers, says a blizzard of lawsuits has led to a fivefold increase in insurance rates in recent years.
Number of patients who canâ€t pay on the rise
Western Pennsylvania hospitals have experienced a dramatic rise in the number of patients unable to pay for emergency care, mainly because of an ever-increasing percentage of residents without medical insurance.In a recent survey of 50 hospitals in the region, the Hospital Council of Western Pennsylvania found that charity care — free care hospitals provide to people who cannot pay for it — increased 22 percent from 2006 to 2007.It amounted to a total $82 million bill and a $15 million increase over the prior year’s $67 million.The survey compared the last six months of 2006 with the same period in 2007. Information used was supplied by the hospitals.Hospital council spokeswoman Pat Raffaele attributed the jump to an increasing number of Pennsylvanians who are living without health insurance."We have an employer-based health insurance system, and a lot of times when people don’t have jobs, they don’t have health insurance," she said.
Sales tactics can put seniors at disadvantage
The sales agent said he worked for Medicare. He really worked for a private insurer. And, after he came to Dorothy Consalvo's Stockbridge home and signed her to a new insurance plan, one she thought would enhance her existing benefits, the 81-year-old said she was shocked to find she had inadvertently given up her longtime Medicare coverage. Up the road in Norcross, another agent talked Violet and Carroll Cox into signing up for a private Medicare plan at the low cost of $7 a month. They say they were told it would give them the same coverage as their supplemental insurance. It didn't. "This agent lied all the way," Violet Cox contends. .
Insurance pitfall snags sellers
For most people, there's probably not a dime's worth of difference between a vacant and an unoccupied home. But Sterling Newberry, and others like him — who have moved into a new home before selling their old one — know better. And they have the high insurance bills to prove it. "We had hoped to sell it first, but then the housing market took a nosedive," said the 92-year-old physicist, who moved with his wife, Mary Lou, to Rhode Island in August 2006. That's when the couple's homeowners' insurance premium tripled because the house, for insurance purposes, is considered vacant. The Newberrys put the house on the market in fall 2005. Before they could unload it, the couple moved into the new place. Brian Merriam of the Merriam Insurance Agency in Schenectady, N.Y., said that once you remove all your belongings, the house is considered vacant, as opposed to unoccupied.
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