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Network Support for ERISA Claim Appeal Compliance

ERISAclaim.com provides unique and unprecedented Network Support, as quality assurance and supplemental but ongoing support for health-care providers, who have participated our seminars and certification programs on health-care ERISA claims denials and appeals resolution services for healthcare providers, physicians, clinics and hospitals.

While managed care reimbursement and health-care cost containment are out of control, and reimbursement crisis is worsening every year, health-care providers are hopeless in suffering from "breaking point" reimbursement deterioration after every efforts failed to stop managed care claim denial abuses.  we provide ongoing educational programs and network support in assisting ERISA claim procedure compliance to prevent and fight back against improper claim denials and abuse.

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More than 70% of healthcare claims denied or delayed each year were not because of coding or billing errors or disputes, but due to non-coding and non-billing related reasons, such as policy exclusion, medical necessity/utilization reviews, pre-existing exclusions, pre-certification, prior-authorization, PPO bundling and downcoding and "unknown" or unexplained reasons. Yet all denials and delays were handled by coding and billing staffs, while up to 80% of healthcare claims are ERISA claims and these coding and billing staffs have no training and knowledge in ERISA, coverage dispute, appeal procedures. No one seems to know what to do, but do whatever they felt need to be done - going circles and frustrations every day.

Coding and billing are less than half of the successful reimbursement practice, coding and billing are not appealing and coverage dispute practice. Many coders and billers are wonderful, non-confrontational and very sophisticated individuals, but they might be terrible and counterproductive debaters, and less than ideal legal reasoning and logical thinkers. Many financial executives are hands-free managers in reimbursement divisions.

The latest Harvard & RAND study for Congress and state legislative debate on Patients' Bills of Rights, conducted by David Studdert and Carole Roan Gresenz, study authors from the Harvard School of Public Health and RAND, funded by federal government, Department Of Labor, and Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, revealed that "little is publicly known about such appeals system", and concluded that "A majority of preservice appeals disputed choice of provider or contractual coverage issues, rather than medical necessity. Medical necessity disputes proliferate not around life-saving treatments but in areas of societal uncertainty about the legitimate boundaries of insurance coverage. Greater transparency about the coverage status of specific services, through more precise contractual language and consumer education about benefits limitations, may help to avoid a large proportion of disputes in managed care."

The updated Harvard & RAND study, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), published on June 18, 2003 through Health Affairs, examined the outcomes of nearly a half-million coverage requests in two large medical groups that contract with health plans to deliver care and conduct utilization review, and discovered the urgency and necessity of expertise of ERISA claim procedure specialists. The study concludes the following in its summary and policy implications:  "....We found much higher denial rates than those previously reported.....Denials made on contractual grounds—the largest share of denials—may call for both clinical and contractual expertise. Hence, they should ideally be made by personnel who are versant in both areas. There was some evidence of this sort of dual expertise being brought to bear on coverage decisions at the two groups we studied."

"......In this environment, contractual coverage and medical-necessity issues that persist are likely to be for services that enrollees feel especially strongly about. Such consumer concerns, together with ongoing consumer protection agendas that include reforms such as guaranteed external review and right-to-sue provisions, mean that the policy importance of UR denials in managed care is unlikely to wane in the foreseeable future."

A JAMA Editorial commenting this study further supported the conclusion of this study and advanced the right solutions more precisely at New ERISA Claim Regulations: "Regulations issued by the Clinton administration in 2000 were designed to infuse rigor into the appeals process maintained by employer-sponsored health plans covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA),¹⁰ which governs insurance arrangements for more than 150 million workers and their family members. Whether these rules will be vigorously enforced remains to be seen."

However these best experts "hired" by Congress and federal government are one step away from the complete discovery and solution. Let us fill in the missing links and connect dots in order to save our health-care system from collapsing and crisis.

First, we identify the controlling force and power in contractual policy coverage denial. The majority of Americans are covered under the employer-sponsored health-care programs in private sectors under ERISA, 80% of the claims and 60% of health expenditures are regulated under ERISA. Each individual ERISA plan offers different coverage and benefits, either self-insured or fully-insured through purchase of insurance from an insurance company. The controlling and governing document for each ERISA plan is Summary Plan Description (SPD), the rule of the game for interpreting each SPD and resolving the disputes on contractual denials is ERISA claims procedure regulations. Therefore the experts from Harvard & Rand study group discovered the importance and necessity of "contractual expertise" but aborted the solution of "contractual expertise" due to "the reasons of size or financial stress, this may be beyond the reach of smaller medical groups that have assumed responsibility for UR".

Financial burden and unavailability of this contractual expertise could be the final resolution to their study group to determine if those contractual denials were made by the plan or TPA correctly.

Clinical knowledge and expertise from those medical groups are inherited, but "contractual expertise" is missing badly for policy coverage, Summary Plan Description (SPD) and ERISA Claims Procedure for 80% of health care claims, because such ERISA contractual expertise is nowhere to be found, even for those very experienced health care attorneys and insurance coverage experts, as state law governed insurance policy dispute resolution and ERISA governed claims procedure dispute resolution are quite different, and entire country has never put ERISA into health-care practice. This is why our health-care system failed.

Another new Rand/Harvard study published on February 2004 issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine, "Disputes over coverage of emergency department services: A study of two health maintenance organizations" discovered that 90% of denial in utilization reviews were overturned on appeals, from a stratified random sample of approximately 3,500 appeals of coverage denials lodged by privately insured enrollees between 1998 and 2000 at 2 of the nation's largest HMOs. This study concludes: "The prevalence of ED cases among all appeals reflects disagreement between lay and expert judgments about what constitutes emergency care under the prudent layperson standard. The high rate at which enrollees win these appeals highlights significant disagreement in interpretation of the standard among different adjudicators within managed care organizations (medical groups and health plans). When enrollees fail to challenge denials that would be reversed on appeal, they bear the financial brunt of ambiguities in interpretation of the prudent layperson standard."

This new Rand/Harvard study warns that "Although the end result for consumers is the same in each of these cases, the messages sent by plans to consumers and medical groups are not. Goodwill payments imply inappropriate use of the ED (notwithstanding the fact that actual merit might not have been assessed). Merit-based overturns, on the other hand, signal an error in utilization review and instruct medical groups about the proper limits of coverage, instructions that medical groups cannot ignore because they must meet the cost of these claims. Hence, merit-based overturns perform a valuable signaling function, akin to the role of judicial precedent in the law. Unless plans invest additional effort in educating utilization reviewers about erroneous decisions for which they are not held financially accountable, goodwill payments of potentially meritorious cases limit opportunities to forge consensus about the limits of the prudent layperson standard and to disseminate accumulated knowledge about its meaning."

Importantly, ERISA claim regulation and definition of "claim involving urgent care", 29CFR2560.503-1 (m)(1) - Claims Procedure, has provided governing solutions to "disagreement between lay and expert judgments about what constitutes emergency care under the prudent layperson standard." for these privately insured enrollees. And "Unless plans invest additional effort in educating utilization reviewers about erroneous decisions for which they are not held financially accountable," and ERISA claim regulation and  definition of "claim involving urgent care'', goodwill solution will result in backslash for more disasters in Emergency Department across the country.

"Forty states required individuals to first exhaust their health policy’s internal appeals and grievance process before seeking external review." (GAO, September 2003, Page 46)  The health policy’s internal appeals and grievance process = ERISA appeals 80% of the time.

If 80% of the health-care claim and 60% of health expenditures are governed and regulated by ERISA, ERISA plan's "insurance policy" is controlled by each plan's Summary Plan Description (SPD), and each claim dispute is resolved under ERISA claims procedure regulations, such "contractual expertise", called for by our Rand/Harvard experts, must be from ERISA claim procedure specialists.

Therefore, it is absolutely clear that our nation must provide a solution to health-care crisis by urgently establishing an industry or profession that will possess not only clinical expertise but also, and more importantly, ERISA contractual expertise, ERISA claim procedure expertise.

This valuable study has pointed out the direction but failed to provide a turnkey practical solution.

Both Aetna and CIGNA have agreed to settle the class-action lawsuits by 950,000 physicians and agreed to process appeals in accordance with ERISA claim regulations for both ERISA claims and non-ERISA claims, and to establish external review boards for Billing and Coding Disputes, Medical Necessity Disputes and Policy Coverage Disputes, in compliance with state external review laws, however external reviews will not be available until internal appeals/ERISA appeals are completely exhausted.

All other 8 major insurance companies named in class-action lawsuits have refused to settle, even if federal court would rule for physicians, the Aetna and CIGNA settlements will be "as good as it could get" from the rest of insurers and MCO's as evidenced in Aetna and CIGNA settlements with physicians.

Unless physicians understand and complete ERISA internal appeals, all of those "a love fest" and "victories" from class-action settlements would mean a fantasy of "a love fest"  to any physicians.

A striking parallel phenomena is also true in the insurance and benefits industry, as described above for medical coding and billing personnel. With the industry compliance tips for the insurance/benefits industry, offered through AAHP in complying with new federal claim regulation, reflected the same problems but provided no practical solutions, the industry is strategically revising the rules of claim processors: "We're taking the claims processors out of the loop. They're good at what they do, but they definitely aren't lawyers. We don't necessarily want them to be making discretionary decisions", said James L. Touse, vice president and associate general counsel for BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, at a 2002 policy conference sponsored by the American Association of Health Plans.

According to latest hospital CEOs survey conducted by American College of Health-care Executives in November 2002, of the 984 hospital CEOs respondents, 65% named reimbursement issues in top three concerns.

The Latest AMA (PSA) Managed Care Hassles Survey through nationwide state medical associations and national medical specialty societies identified the most popular and important managed-care claim denials and delays.

In today's progressively worsening health-care and budget crisis since World War II, any health-care executive strategy, without mastering or complying with ERISA, has been proven failing since inception of managed care practice, unless a new health-care reimbursement and compliance model is established and implemented to immediately create a new line of ERISA reimbursement personnels and occupation, "ERISA Healthcare Claim Appeals and Reimbursement Specialists and Departments", no one in this country can stop and survive our failing health care system crisis.

After a one year delay, New Federal Benefit Claims Procedure Regulation has become effective January 01, 2003 for almost all of the private group health plans. It will affect about 80% of health-care claims or 60% of health expenditures, approximately 6 million private health and welfare plans and approximately 150 Million Workers and their dependents  in the U. S..

Contrary to the popular belief, the regulation provides more protections for physicians and patients than state insurance and Prompt Pay Laws, and more protections and clarifications for insurance companies and the ERISA plan sponsors as well as the third party benefits administrators than state laws in punitive damages as proposed in Patients Bill Of Rights.

However, failure to understand and comply timely with the regulation  will invite and suffer from unanticipated financial and legal consequences.

Any traditional and conventional appeals without ERISA COMPLIANCE are "squeaky wheel appeals" for any ERISA claim denials and delays, 80 percent of U.S. Healthcare claims and 60% of U.S. Healthcare expenditure.

Only appeals with full ERISA compliance will ensure maximum reimbursement or crisis turnaround at minimum cost and frustrations.

AMA has finally noticed the existence and effective date of this new federal claim regulation, as described in its January 20, 2003 online edition of American Medical News: "Federal regulations that dictate rapid turnaround times for health plan claims and appeals quietly went into effect this month, with little noise from the managed care industry."

However AMA has failed, as it did in past 28 years, to practically and meaningfully understand the ERISA and its significance as protections for health-care providers, entire industry has failed to offer any educational programs and occupational trainings to health-care providers in this most important federal law and regulation that governs and regulates up to 80% of health-care claims and 60% of U.S. healthcare expenditures.

As reported by AMA as to the time it may take for this new federal claim regulation to take effect in marketplace, Jeffery Mandell, president of the ERISA Law Group in Boise, Idaho, states "it often takes years, even decades, for the marketplace to fully adopt new regulations". Life is too short, our nation's health-care system is going through the worst crisis since World War II and can't afford another 28 years to realize and implement the ERISA regulations. We, everyone including health-care providers, legislators, regulators and insurance companies, should take immediate actions to educate everyone in the system and to implement this new federal claim regulation as we are fighting against terrorists to save our nation's health-care system from worse-than-terror-war crisis.

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