> Yeah, these sure are the guys I want handling my healthcare....

I'm guessing that whoever set up the C4C servers had little time to
actually design anything and no clue (who did?) about its popularity,
though of course bad architecture or bad coding could also play into
it.

My experience as a client of private-sector insurance, and some
closely observed vicarious experiences with the provider side of the
health care business, suggests that medical billing is seldom done
well by anybody in the sense of either process design or day-to-day
work. Back-office chaos seems to come with the territory, and
except for islands of excellence (or at least islands of competence)
I'm not sure whether any of the parties to the transaction --
patients, providers, or insurers -- are really satisfied with the way
it works now.

Sometimes I wonder if anybody really fully understands the systems and
the rules they are supposed to implement, except of course for the
overarching principle that "a motion to partly or wholly deny a claim
for something that the patient and/or care provider thought would be
covered is always in order." If Dante lived today, I'm sure that in
some vestibule near the gates of Hell, some category of minor sinners
would spend eternity going over Explanations of Benefit (EOBs) with
confused elderly relatives on fixed incomes.

For sure one of the more attractive aspects of a single-payer,
universal-coverage scheme (or collection of schemes that are
tantamount to it) is the simplicity as viewed by the poor pilgrim
with the bag of ice on his head and the thermometer in his mouth...

What we've got now is complicated (with the implication of a lot of
heat-loss in the machinery), expensive, and yet leaves a lot of people
with sham coverage or none at all, especially in times of widespread
job loss. I'm not sure any particular reform proposal really has it
nailed, but there's got to be something better than this...
--Joe