Blue Cross Blue Shield Standard Authorization: Fill & Download for Free

Recommend you first obtain a doctor’s order for medical necessity for the stair lift and the request BCBS to perform a pre authorization for the lift. Standard medical insurance does not like to pay for Durable Medical Equipment of this type. I have only known one case where insurance paid and this person had MS with severe complications and could not walk.Once you have gotten the doctor’s order for medical necessity request the preauthorization. Just phone them to the number is on the back of your BCBS card.You can get a good lift for around $2500.We have my mother-in-law now living with us in a downstairs converted room. We converted the formal dinning room into a bedroom. We just moved the dinning room furniture into the living room.Wish you luck with this issue. Sometimes it is best to keep the person on the first floor level for a long list of reasons.

For the most part, in the years before the founding of the NHS, the medical system didn’t work; not in the sense that patients were not treated, but in the sense that the whole structure was financially unsustainable.This had been recognised for decades; as advances in medicine - especially hospital medicine - increased costs, so the historic charitable endowments of the ‘voluntary’ hospitals in each town were unable to support their expenditures. Right up to the end of the 19th century, admission to hospital had been largely confined to poor and working-class patients; anyone with any money would expect to be treated at home for all medical procedures - including major surgery. But advances in antiseptic practice, anaesthetics, radiography and therapeutic techniques (especially in the course of the First World War) meant that, for the first time, hospitals were admitting as inpatients, large numbers of persons from the professional, managerial and landed classes (and their families). Who in turn expected consistently higher levels of service and care delivery - increasing required staffing levels, and so costs. In effect, voluntary hospitals changed from being entirely charitable - applying accumulated historic endowments to treat the poor without charge - into non-profit businesses treating the general population, most of whom were capable of paying fees.These hospitals then established a new profession, the ‘hospital almoner’, whose job was to assess how much each patient might be able to contribute towards their treatment. Voluntary hospitals fitted out a proportion of their accommodation as ‘private beds’, for patients paying a regular fee; and also introduced ‘contributory schemes’ to spread payments. Every voluntary hospital also collected extensively in the streets; and solicited bequests from grateful patients and relatives; but none of this could keep pace with medical cost inflation. And as populations aged; so non-payng ‘charitable’ patient numbers also increased.Alongside these voluntary hospitals for acute illnesss - each usually called ‘The Royal’; there were in most towns also municipal infirmaries, funded from the rates - each commonly called ‘The General’. These had originally been the workhouse hospital departments of the former Poor Law Unions; and so lacked endowments, and had been provided to care for patients with chronic conditions; but under the Local Government Act of 1929 they could be taken over by their host local authority and redesignated to offer general and acute care. Under this legislation, these new general hospitals were required to recover treatment costs where possible, and accordingly changed to become more like the voluntary hospitals; imposing charges on better-off patients assessed through almoners to supplement their annual budgets from the town hall, and sometimes creating private wards of their own.But the recovered charges were never enough in total; so there were a whole succession of official reports and commissions on how to fix the system; with governments handing out ‘short-term’ finance to bridge the revenue gap until some sort of permanent solution could be devised. A wide variety of local schemes were implemented in the 1930s, looking to integrate voluntary and municipal hospitals under the overall supervision of of the local Medical Officer of Health, while collecting extra weekly per capita subscriptions from working-class populations to cover access to hospital; but none were found to be capable of full self-financing for the entire populations of all ages and conditions of employment, in the absence of some form of recurring central grant.Alongside these two hospital systems were General Practice doctors; most of whom maintained a ‘panel’ of patients who who had become entitled to access GP medical care under the terms of the National Insurance Act of 1911, which had established a compulsory National Insurance Fund, paid for from employee and employer contributions - although all drug costs were extra. About half of the adult population in 1936 - those with regular employment below the statutory threshold - were on a National Insurance GP panel; but older persons, non-employed wives, and children remained outside the National Insurance system; as did the self-employed and higher-paid, professional employees. General Practitioners therefore established their own supplementary panels, tailored with monthly subscriptions according to assessed ability to pay. Many GPs also worked in hospitals; as did a smaller number of consultant doctors holding medical specialisms. In principle, the doctor’s hospital treatment fee was separate from any assessed hospital payment - so paying patients faced two bills (or three, if continuing drug prescriptions were factored in).But then the war came; and with it a long-planned wartime doubling of the acute hospital capacity of the country. Heavy civilian casualties were expected from bombing and gassing; and also from psychiatric trauma (which fortunately proved over-pessimistic). But war brought catastrophic injuries; and rapid advances in therapy to deal with them. All general and psychiatric hospitals were effectively nationalised within the wartime Emergency Medical Service. Using standardised designs in pre-fabricated wooden huts; most general hospitals were extended with extra wards. support services, and operating theatres.When the war finished, the old issues of finance would re-emerge; now doubled in scale and triple the cost. Neither the historic charitable endowments of the voluntary hospitals, nor the local rates, had been sufficient to support aggregate day-by-day hospital running costs before the war; now hospital budgets had trebelled, but the endowment income was no different. It was inevitable that the EMS would simply carry forward into peacetime as the NHS. A few hospitals withdrew to become wholly ‘private’ (maternity hospitals in particular); but for the bulk of long-stay, emergency and acute hospital care - including all municipal hospitals- there was no alternative to nationalisation.The tricky issue was General Practice. The British Medical Association fought a long battle to keep GPs from being incorporated into the new NHS; but were outmanouvered by Nye Bevan; who ensured that hospital specialists would receive relatively generous pay packages - plus the freedom to maintain elective private practice ‘on the side’. GP practices remained as private businesses, but their National Insurance panels were replaced by NHS registration (which simply carried forwards into peacetime, the wartime system of national registration that already existed). Even if GPs wanted to practice entirely privately, very few could make a living outside the NHS; as together, hospital-delivered specialist clinical services and General Practice registration by central capitation fees met almost the whole population demand for medical treatment - even for higher paid professional families who had formerly been excluded from state or municipal medical systems.Which is how the system in 1948 became established as ‘free at point of service’ for the whole population, rich and poor; and no fees were charged to anyone - either for treatments or for drugs. Facing a crisis in 1950, the second Attlee government met its financial shortfall by imposing co-payment prescription charges, and charges for dental and optical services (Bevan resigned); but the overall principle was maintained.We can compare this with the history of medical systems in the United States over the same period. Up to the 1890s, the two systems were broadly similar. US municipalites maintained workhouses and county hospitals; while there were a smaller number of large specialist endowed ‘voluntary’ hospitals in the big cities - mostly attached to prestigious medical schools. And just as in Britain, 20th century advances in medical technology created a demand for greatly expanded access to hospital treatment for populations beyond the very poor. But in the US, there had also always been a considerable number of commercial ‘proprietary’ clinics and hospitals; who had no charitable endowments, but were financed entirely from patient fees paid to the doctors who ran and owned them.In the early decades of the 20th century, proprietary hospitals in the United States expanded rapidly, as outside the big cities, voluntary hospital provision was largely inaccessible. Moreover, as proprietary hospitals were not seeking to cross-subsidise charitable free treatments for the poor from paying patients, they could generally undercut voluntary hospital fees. At the same time, new hospital construction in the United States consisted entirely of ‘private’ wards with individual rooms - whereas in the UK open wards remained the predominant standard, even for newbuild. The United States lacked any system of compulsory public medical insurance, either to pay for doctors or for hospitals; proposals to include health coverage in the Social Security Act of 1935 having been dropped. In 1929 a consortium of Texas hospitals set up Blue Cross, and in 1939 a consortium of California doctors set up Blue Shield. But, without public mandate support, neither Blue Cross nor Blue Shield were able to establish a substantial market share; in 1940 about 9% of the adult population had health insurance.But in the United States - as in Britain - the key factor that wholly transformed the health system was state action and public funding in the second World War, resulting in a centrally driven rapid expansion of hospital provision, and consequently hospital budgets; which continued into peacetime and then needed to be paid for. Following the outbreak of War, the Federal government had introduced strong controls on wage inflation to prevent wartime enterprises bidding against one another for scarce resources of labour. Instead, however, war industries sought to attract workers with heavily cross-subsidised health insurance benefit packages, and from 1943, these were fully tax-deductable for both employers and employees. At the time, this looked like an easy win (wartime workers did not initially use hospitals that much more than before); but it had the long term effect of locking the entire working population into a very costly model of medical care administration and delivery, with spectacular administrative overheads in individual billing and insurance sales; and as these workers got older and their medical needs increased; so too did the consequent costs on the taxpayer. It was indeed already apparent to goverment economists by 1945 that these ad-hoc wartime health arrangements had the potential for unlimited upward cost pressures on public finance, and President Truman proposed to replace them with a standard-benefit national health care package for all citizens, but found himself opposed by the united lobbying of both the medical and insurance industries - as too by trades unions who reckoned to have negotiated more favourable health coverage for their memebers - and the proposal failed. By 1950, 50% of adult Americans were covered by publically-subsidised employer-contracted health insurance; and by 1960 this had increased to 66%. The US system is dressed-up as ‘employer/employee’ insurance funded; but this obscures the actuality that the bulk of this money is underwritten in large degree from the public purse.Lacking a centrally mandated universal health care system, the problems of escalating health spending expectations and demands in the United States fell primarily on employers (who had discretion to determine the scope of insurance policies to be offered to their employees); and on insurers (who had the discretion to negotiate favourable payment arrangements with selected hospitals and clinicians). By the late 20th century, the latter factor had transformed almost all health insurance operations for US populations into arrangements for ‘managed care’. Instead of insurers covering medical bills retrospectively as ‘fee-for-service’, only treatments within a pre-contracted clincical ‘network’ would be covered - generally with a range of coverage exclusions, and co-payments. This did effectively hold down the growth of insured payments - but only by reducing choice and shifting exceptional and excluded payments back onto the patients themselves. At the same time, employers looked for ways to reduce the growth in their health insurance premiums; which led increasingly to policies being offered to younger and healthier employees with lower premium costs, but with high levels of annual ‘deductible’ payments falling on the patient. Whereas co-payments (where the patient makes a standard contribution towards particular treatments) can be shown to hold down some unnecessary health expenditures; deductibles (where the patient is only re-imbursed when annual spend exceeds a standard sum) are notoriously liable to result in over-treatment and investigations of limited value - as the more the total spend, the greater is the proportion of annual cost paid from the insurer. Anyone developing a medical condition associated with continued health care requirements was likely to lose out both ways; their choice of insurance policy would be constrained by exclusion clauses relating to pre-existing conditions; while annual premiums for policies without high deductibles became much more expensive.Which has now resulted in the paradoxical situtation that the entire publicly funded British National Health System receives lower per capita public funding than does the tax-funded element of the notionally ‘non-socialised’ US health system - once all Medicare, Medicaid, and tax subsidies are taken into account. So, each US resident has to pay eyewatering levels medical support costs through their taxes; and then find ever more exorbitant medical insurance, co-payment and deductible costs on top of that. In fact, far the most common international model of universal health provision is one financed by subsidised individual insurance contracts, with standard terms regulated through a national scheme; and most of these result in health system funding costs per capita not much greater than those of the British National Health system; and often achieving equal or better overall scores on standard health quality indicators. It appears that only the US system manages to combine exceptionally high public funding costs, with exceptionally poor health outcomes from treatment and care for the bulk of their populations with severe health needs. While apparently affording the average US health user far the worst options anywhere in individual treatment choice.So, even the the UK had not adopted a single-payer, tax funded, model of universal health coverage, it is highly unlikely that they would have found themselves facing the combination of runaway payment levels, poor quality outcomes, and grossly constrained individual choices, that now plague the populations of the United States. See U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2019: Higher Spending, Worse Outcomes?

Worst answers I’ve ever seen on Quora, for this question and it’s author. One of the other commentators, who fits the profile for my response, received 5000 up-votes from her “Me Too supporters”; who failed to ask a Simple Question, Like … “what Country is she in?”.Troubling to see the same “Me Too!” Knee-jerk type of “support” responses.What COUNTRY are they living in? Obviously, if you are living in Russia, or Australia, or the Middle East; these are ALL completely different Health-Medical Systems than the USA!In the US - You have Hospital’s Inpatient Care / Surgery’s & Hospital ER’s, THEN, Urgent Care Centers (UCC), THEN, Community Heath-care Center Clinics (CHCC), PPO (Preferred Provider Organization) Clinic’s or Medical centers, and then, HMO Clinic’s & Hospita’s like Kaiser or Humana, who take Blue Cross/Blue Shield or has a Employee Plan, etc. HMO = (Health Maintenance Organization).In the US - Most of the CLINIC BASED Health-care Systems, in 2017, have a Universal Pre-check In times from 30 to 45 minutes, for 1st time patients. Pre-check in times are for filling out forms & copying ID’s, usually. For established patients, arriving 15 to 20 minutes early is ‘Standard’.To the Author - For Established Clients or patients - Arriving On-Time or up to 5 minutes late, most times is not a problem, UN-less you have a history of always running late, then that is a problem … and is Yours.In the US - your phone should already have Their NUMBER in your Contact List. There’s No Excuses for this omission. None.Call ASAP - if you are running late or stuck in traffic, or whatever. The staff will appreciate it and will adust the schedule and you may be able to still be seen that day, without any Issues. Be Responsible.In the US - MOST scheduled Appointments with clinic’s or health centers, the Staff will call you 1 or 2 days beforehand, OrTo the author - If your doctor’s office, does NOT have this Pre-appointment Call policy, then you should Suggest it, especially if they have Updated their Check-in Times. If they don’t, then it’s their fault, and you should not be penalized. Always share any Appointment Issues or Problems with your doctor, since they are the ones to set any new changes.TIP - Call Them on the day of your appointment to Re/Confirm & to check the Appointment Schedule Flow, in case they are running ahead or behind.For one of the other commentators - I don’t know about Other Countries (where you get FREE Universal Health Care), BUT, here In the US … if you Act Out with an Entitled & Arrogant manner … No One There will forget 2 Things … your Face & Name … for future reference.To the author - You also have the right to ask for a written, hard COPY of any Updated Appointment-Scheduling Changes that have been made recently, either be given to you in person, or mailed. If they don’t have any Written statement, then they cannot and should not penalize You or any other client or patient. This duty fall’s on the head of the facility’s Administrator. All medical-health facilities must follow HIPPA Laws & Regulations. FYI.