Thousands of people are caught in the middle of a contract fight between UConn Health and Aetna.<\/p>\n
Now, the health system is considered out-of-network for many patients with Aetna insurance.<\/p>\n
Months of negotiations have so far failed to reach a deal. And now it means a lot of frustrations and uncertainties for what we\u2019re told is about 15,000 patients who are affected.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou’re using patients as a football for negotiation tactics, and that’s absolutely wrong,\u201d Sen. Jeff Gordon (R\u2013Woodstock) said.<\/p>\n
State lawmakers say they\u2019re already hearing from people concerned about their healthcare.<\/p>\n
For many Aetna members, UConn Health is out-of-network as of Monday.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat’s happened is that the insurance industry has been very heavy-handed. What they say is that if you’re not going to agree to our terms, we are going to actually eliminate the ability of you to provide care to our members,\u201d Sen. Saud Anwar (D\u2013South Windsor) said.<\/p>\n
The change can mean patients having their appointments canceled, finding new providers or paying more.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Aetna said while negotiating a new contract, UConn was asking for significantly higher reimbursement rates and that would increase costs for patients.<\/p>\n
They wrote: \u201cAetna has engaged in good faith efforts to reach a fair agreement that keeps health care affordable for our employers and members.\u201d<\/p>\n
UConn said the rates it receives from Aetna are much lower than those of other health systems in the state.<\/p>\n
In a statement, they said: \u201cWe remain hopeful that Aetna will return to the table with a fair, sustainable proposal so we can restore in-network access as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
UConn said some patients can qualify to continue their in-network rates for a limited time and emergency care is always covered in-network.<\/p>\n
With these health coverage battles seemingly happening more often around the state, there is bipartisan support for the legislature to step in.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll keep pushing to try and make sure we protect our patients in our state when people fight with each other on money,\u201d Anwar said.<\/p>\n
\u201cRemove the patients from the negotiations, and don’t make them liable, and don’t hurt their care in any way,\u201d Gordon said.<\/p>\n
One idea lawmakers have is patients\u2019 care automatically defaults to in-network as long as it takes for the insurance company and medical group to hash out a contract.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Thousands of people are caught in the middle of a contract fight between UConn Health and Aetna. Now,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[97,252,253],"class_list":{"0":"post-326991","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}