Getting Health Insurance Help from Private Agencies

Part 1: The Basic Tools, Chapter 3: Developing a Systematic Approach to Dealing with Health Insurance Page 24

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You can also discuss health insurance problems with a private organization. (See Chapter 9 for information on private organizations that offer help with Medicare-related problems.) You can consult an attorney, as well, to determine whether legal issues may be involved in a particular health insurance problem. As we discussed earlier, there are an enormous number of state and federal laws and regulations that relate to health insurance. An attorney can review those laws and regulations with you, and can determine whether they may relate to your particular problem.

If your health insurance problem appears to be shared by many other individuals, you may also be able to enlist the help of your state or federal legislative representatives. Neither the state nor the federal legislature generally has any direct influence on specific decisions related to individual health insurance problems, even if those problems involve a government-sponsored program such as CHAMPUS, COBRA, Medicare, Medicaid, or ERISA However, legislative representatives can schedule hearings to deal with general health insurance issues, and can consider the possibility of introducing new legislation to deal with problems that affect a large number of people. In fact, many of the new state and federal health insurance laws that now help to protect the rights of consumers were passed because of support from citizens who had experienced specific health insurance problems.

The likelihood that the state or federal legislature will focus on a particular type of health insurance problem may increase with the number of letters that legislators receive on the issue. One way to help ensure that legislators will consider specific health insurance issues is to join an existing advocacy or self-help group that deals with those issues, or to form a new advocacy group to deal with specific concerns. (See the listing for the American Self-Help Clearinghouse in Appendix B for in formation about existing advocacy and self-help groups.)

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