Corvallis Clinic - Dropping Patients
As our health care system is rather broke, I had a thought about the Samaritan Health Care system and the fact that they are sometimes tied to insurance. So what happens if you are a state employee and choose Samaritan Health HMO for your insurance but they end up sending you a "[we] find that we can no longer provide you with health care services" letter. Are you no longer able to get health care due to the fact that your insurance is tied to their services?
I suspect Samaritan Health doesn't do that for several reasons:
1. They have the emergency room and likely can't turn someone away in life and death situations
2. They have ethics
3. They can stand on their good reputation and a blogger won't faze them
The Corvallis Clinic has an Immediate Care and Ambulatory Surgical Center but those aren't really emergency rooms.
I also wonder if they can fire other family members, like my husband or my son. They are no longer treating my son as one of their pediatricians is pretty inept at diagnosing autism so that is not a problem. But I do wonder if they will stop treating my husband.
Time will tell.
As a word to the wise, if you are given the option between Corvallis Clinic and the Samaritan Family Medicine, I strongly encourage you to choose the latter. They are good at billing and listening to their patients in both Corvallis and Albany.
I really dont think much of
I really dont think much of samaritan or of any private for profit health care. Ethics yeah right
Samaritan is actually a
Samaritan is actually a non-profit organization. They try hard to focus on the individual while struggling with government regulation and medicare control. Read up on how medicare forces health care to meet it's sometimes ridiculous requirements. This area owes more than they know to this system. If it weren't for the efforts of Samaritan to consolidate local hospitals and create some defenses against corporate buy-out, we may be like Cottage Grove who lost their local hospital to one of the large corporations who immediately liquidated it due to lack of profitablility. You aren't going to see this happen here due to the strength of the Samaritan system. Every day is a struggle to maintain profitability in the face of local health care issues such as drug-seeking behavior and over use of the system by uninsured individuals. Of course some areas of Samaritan are very profitable, but the system as a whole must balance the budget at the end of the day and continue to offer outstanding health care and specialty care to our region. It's easy to criticize.
I'm with you.
I'm with you.