Category: health issues

One of the nation’s largest health insurance companies appears to have systematically dropped policy-holders after an HIV diagnosis, Reuters reports, based on court documents from a South Carolina lawsuit.

The insurance company was then called Fortis, but is now called Assurant Health. Court documents “reveal that Fortis had a company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV. A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy”, Waas reports.

The practice of reviewing, and sometimes dropping policy holders who have been given expensive diagnoses is common among US insurers—especially in the “individual market” through which people who are not covered by an employers’ group health plan are able to buy insurance policies.

The practice is called rescission and has provided many of the more outrageous stories offered during the ongoing debate over health-care reform.

The report by Murray Waas focuses on the case of Jerome Mitchell, a 17-year old college freshman from rural South Carolina who eventually filed suit against Fortis/Assurant Health.

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A report released last week by a progressive think tank detailed the many ways that US evangelical churches and right-wing political activists have helped to amplify—and even create—a deep well of homophobia in the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.

The activities of conservative US and European churches and of the missionaries they’ve dispatched to Africa, have have helped make LGBT people in Africa “collateral damage” of the US culture war, the report’s author states.

But US government funding is also involved in the cultural war that is now being waged in Africa against the continent’s sexual minorities.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed column yesterday, James Kirchick—an assistant editor of the New Republic and a contributing writer to the Advocate—urges US officials to make sure foreign aid funds are not being used to support that African version of the US culture war.

Kirchick discusses the funding offered to African countries through the widely praised PEPFAR—President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief—program.

The program, which was recently renewed by Congress, was created in 2003 by former President George W. Bush and has so far distributed nearly $50 billion worldwide, mostly in Africa. Funds are to be used to prevent the spread of HIV and to treat its victims.

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Washington Blade’s Chris Johnson reports that the health care reform bill unveiled Monday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could could restrict benefits from flowing to LGBT people.

A Human Rights Campaign analyst warns, “I think there are some areas where there’s a potential there won’t be access to some of the benefits” for LGBT people.

Johnson writes:

[T]he bill, H.R. 3962, uses the terms “family” and “dependent,” and advocates say the new Health Choices Commissioner — a position established in the legislation to oversee the insurance exchange — could interpret this language to mean someone’s opposite-sex spouse, but not a same-sex spouse.

For example, the section describing the retiree reinsurance program — for which employer-based programs could submit claims to the government — says claims could be made on “employment based health benefits provided to a retiree or to the spouse, surviving spouse, or dependent of a retiree.”

Brian Moulton, the Human Rights Campaign’s chief legislative counsel, said the term “dependent” and “family” in the bill are “fairly open-ended” and “leave a lot of discretion to the new commissioner to define them.”

“Clearly, the only way to … ensure equality across the board is to repeal DOMA,” a legislative aide who requested anonymity told Johnson.

Others, including Rep. Tammy Baldwin and an HIV/AIDS advocate, insist that the bill would benefit many LGBT people even if DOMA remains in place.

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