This is Alyssa.
If you read my diaries you might remember Alyssa from this account.
Alyssa also used to write Haiti diaries here on Daily Kos as allie123. She's had multiple sclerosis for many years now, and eventually it got bad enough that she couldn't write them any more. But she can still tweet! Now she is Occupy Oakland's unofficial official tweeter.
Alyssa needs medication that costs $30,000 a year to allow her to keep going strong. Her insurance company, PacificCare, is supposed to handle that.
This is PacificCare.
This is how PacificCare operates.
California regulators are seeking fines of up to $9.9 billion from health insurer PacifiCare over allegations that it repeatedly mismanaged medical claims, lost thousands of patient documents, failed to pay doctors what they were owed and ignored calls to fix the problems.In court filings and other documents, the California Department of Insurance says PacifiCare violated state law nearly 1 million times from 2006 to 2008
This is PacificCare's profit for the year: $5,000,000,000 (that's right, billion).Despite (or because of) this, PacificCare has multiple assholes in it. They play the same game with Alyssa every three months, denying her a prescription refill, hoping she'll give up in frustration. After days of persistence on Alyssa's part, calling and holding, calling and holding, they ultimately give her what she is entitled to by law -- her medicine. And they've been playing this cruel game for years.
Below is Alyssa's latest story. It took place over the span of about four hours two days ago, and like all of Alyssa's stories nowdays, it is a tale told in tweets.
Woven through it, though, is a much bigger lesson than simply one of persistence. It a lesson of why health insurance companies like those that exist in America are a plague on society, a horrible cancer on the economy, a pyschological nightmare to millions of Americans, and the real death panel to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of others. And why they need to go away.
Let us begin.