Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to Disability Empowerment now season four bonus.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: I'm your host, Keith Murphy de Gansini. Today I'm talking to Frank Loeb, a retired Navy pilot and author of the book the Big Lie in My Health Care Bill.
Frank, welcome to the show.
[00:00:40] Speaker C: Thank you much, very much. Appreciate being asked to participate.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: It's been wonderful getting to know you before this interview. It's taken a long time to schedule, but you have such a fascinating life story that I know a bit about.
For the legend and viewer, why don't you expand upon my intro?
[00:01:20] Speaker C: My. My son recently asked me to write another book for the family. I've written four for healthcare. But what he basically said was, dad, you've done so many different things in your life. Please put it down on paper so we know what you've done anyway. Yeah, I've been very fortunate. Life. I came out of school and I went into the Navy, became a pilot and I flew for the Navy for 20 years. And I came out of that and then went into corporate life with DuPont. And I rose through the corporate organization, became a general manager in one of their middle businesses.
I became very active in the Clean Air act and air compliance in the country.
Once I left dupont, I consulted for the EPA and did several national conferences for epa. And what that did is it gave me an experience in law, in compliance, regulation and so forth.
That really created a problem when my health insurance refused to allow me to pay for the care my wife needed.
I had health insurance. She was near death.
The doctor prescribed care. Our insurance company said they refused coverage. I said, no problem, I'll pay for it. And I was told I could not.
The hospital refused to allow me to pay for her health care and she died.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: Wait, what kind of hospital refuses payment out of pocket from the.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Every in network hospital in the country?
[00:03:12] Speaker B: Wow, that's.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: Everyone has a contract that states that when your insurance refuses coverage, they cannot bill you or accept any compensation for any health care they provide you.
That's the big lie. You just uncovered the big lie in the first part of this interview. Yeah, I don't have to argue this. I've read the contracts. It's black letter law, okay? They are not allowed to bill you or accept any compensation for the care. That's the coverage that's being denied.
And so I went through four hospitals and was refused four times to pay for the care my wife needed. She died and I sued the insurance company for eight years on that very point. Now, where I was wrong was I sued on the basis of breach of Contract.
And that was wrong because you don't own your policy, your employer owns it, or if you buy it directly, the insurance company owns it. So on a basic principle of law, I lacked the standing to sue because the contract wasn't mine. Okay. Yeah. So. But what it did do for me, and it was interesting in that the insurance industry could have walked into court and said right up front, he has no standing because he doesn't own the contract.
They didn't do that.
We slugged away at each other for eight years.
Wow.
So they did not want to acknowledge that there was no contract. To me, that's the only interpretation makes any sense.
But what all those years allowed me to do was given the fact that I had been in the Clean Air act and in Washington and EPA and all that stuff, was to drag out of them, piece by piece, the contracts that define the industry.
Okay. And so once I had read those, I honestly felt that if I just disclosed them, Congress, somebody would do something to get honest with the American people.
And I was dead flat wrong.
Every place I went, including my own congressman, who was the chair of the House subcommittee on Health and Insurance, acknowledged what I was saying and then flat shut me down.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: And matter of fact, his chief of staff called me, and I'm not using names because I don't want to get in trouble, but his chief of staff called me after I had met with the congressman, and he said, who in the. And he used the full word F, do you think you are?
If you think you're coming to Washington, you have another thing coming.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: Okay. This is brutal stuff because it's. You're talking about 20% of the United States yearly market.
Okay. You're talking in terms of trillions of dollars, $4.4 trillion a year.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:06:35] Speaker C: And that's the kind of money that our private health care insurance, private health care system is.
Is raking in out of our pocket.
And if you stand up and want to do something to derail it, they will come after you.
Now, the big advantage I have is I've read enough of their contracts that I can. And they're so similar. I can write a contract that's identical in essence, to the ones that they've written, but it's not the same. Okay. It's just enough different that they can't claim I copied their contract, but it's similar enough that you and all your leader, your readers can read it. It's in the back of the book and have an understanding of what they have done.
And it.
I. I Started out this. Let me run on a little bit.
[00:07:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:38] Speaker C: Today is a very unique day.
They just indicted and arraigned the shooter of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. They did it today.
And they also arraigned the shooter of Charlie Kirk. Yeah. Now, what are these two people?
What's common about him? And I'm going to say a great, great deal.
The gentleman who just helped me set this Zoom meeting up agreed with. We talked about it beforehand because he's younger than I am, but he and I both agreed when we were younger men, we could trust the system.
Yeah. It was fair, it was honest.
Now, there were different political views and people argued back and forth, but the systems themselves, the law and the systems you could pretty much count on to be in your corner and to help you can't do that anymore.
And I can prove to you, and I will let anybody try to show me I'm wrong. And if I'm wrong, I'm wrong.
But I'm not going to lose this because the language is too clear.
The health care insurance industry is lying to every one of us.
We do not owe the bill we're being given.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: So let's go back. I'm sorry to hear that your first wife died.
When was that?
[00:09:17] Speaker C: It's almost ancient history.
And I can give you the history because it's very clear.
Back in the night, around 1990, Congress was pushing hard for the expansion of health insurance.
It started insurance started way back around the 30s.
But by 1990, healthcare insurance was a big thing in the United States.
Employers were giving it to their employees.
And the expansion of the insurance companies was very, very rapid and large.
And a number of them went bankrupt because they expanded too quickly. And the biggest was Maxicare.
Well, health insurance is regulated and health care by the states.
And the states became very concerned because when these companies went bankrupt, the providers, the doctors and the hospitals were just turning around and billing the patients for what the insurer didn't pay.
On top of that, because there were these bills out there.
The states could not simply transfer an insured individual from a bankrupt company to a viable company, which is what they wanted to do.
So they wrote legislation and they wrote a template that every state implemented. And it was done through a thing called the national association of Insurance Commissioners. And that's why all these contracts are the same.
And so what they did is they said that if, if an insurance company failed to pay for whatever reason, they failed to pay for the care that you got for whatever reason, that the provider, the in network provider, could not bill or collect any compensation from the patient.
Okay, that's fine. Way back some years ago, I actually listened to what they told me and I asked them, well, wait a minute.
How can you. How can they then bill when the insurer doesn't pay? Oh, this is only for.
In cases of insolvency or bankruptcy. Well, wait a minute. Doesn't say bankruptcy in the legislation, doesn't say it in the contracts. How do you get that out of it? Well, that's our. Our interpretation.
And under Supreme Court ruling, a state has the right to interpret its own legislation for enforcement purposes.
Please understand that word enforcement, because we're not talking about enforcement. We're talking about a private contract.
So once they put that language into a private contract, what the state thinks it means has no relevance at all.
It's called four corners.
It means exactly what it says. And it says they can't bill you, period, or accept any compensation.
And what. Some months ago, I wrote a letter to the.
To my governor, who was the former attorney general, and I asked him that question.
But I said, and please don't have one of your minions give me an explanation of what you want it to mean. In other words, what your interpretation is. Give me the interpretation under contract law.
Now, the only reason I did that, because I knew I wouldn't get an answer, and I haven't, and I won't, because black letter law is just exactly what the language states.
And boy, it says you can't get paid. Now, to confirm that there was a hospital that I did deal with back then, and I talked at great length to the vice president of legal for that hospital, and we. He agonized over the fact that they had tried for some years to get the insurance industry to allow them to have a patient pay for their own care when the insurance refused.
Okay. And they had failed for years.
He said it was impossible.
And, and believe me, I've been in court, the insurance company. This is the power of the insurance industry. In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that private insurance companies have the right to induce the rationing of health care.
And what that means is that they can refuse coverage in order to get a doctor or a hospital to give you less expensive care.
Okay, but that should allow you to pay for it if you wanted it.
Okay, but that question has never been taken into court. And the. Well, I shouldn't say never. It has been taken into court, and the court runs from it as quickly as they can as they can get out the door, because it will cripple the Entire health insurance industry.
What they are doing is rationing healthcare. You can't dispute that.
And they're doing it by barring all payment. Once they deny coverage, you cannot pay for it in any in network hospital in the country, period.
And they're not allowed to talk to it, talk about it because at the back end of those contracts is a confidentiality provision that bars every doctor and hospital from even mentioning the contract, let alone what's in it.
Okay. Now I've never lost this fight.
I take care of my family.
I had a reasonable recent small issue of a health care bill.
I was in the, actually in the operating room. They came in with a credit card machine. I wanted $3,000 for the procedure and I couldn't get around it. So I gave him the 3,000, I gave him a credit card.
But I came out and just simply cited the law and I got my $3,000 back immediately.
The, the hospital association never even tried to justify the bill.
They asked me back three or twice for a follow up procedure which I refused. And then they sent me a birthday card. But they never once tried to defend the bill.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: That's so bizarre.
I mean I, I can't get over after all of it, they sent you a birthday card.
Why?
[00:16:19] Speaker C: Well, you know, there's no question that health care expenses are very high. Yeah, a real problem for the country.
But let me give you another example.
A couple of years ago I had a problem with my right knee. So I went to an orthopedic surgeon and I went in there and he looked at my knee and they took some X rays and then he consulted with me and he said, got the solution. What your problem is you're beginning to, you lose some cartilage and this is, can't be repaired, but I can replace your knee.
I can give you a brand new knee and this will all go away.
And I said I'm kind of fond of this knee. I've had it a long time. Isn't there an alternative? Well, we could give you some, an injection that'll limit the inflation, inflammation and it might work, but it might not. But the real solution here is a new knee.
So I, I took option B and I got a, an injection of cortisone.
Yeah, my knee's fine.
So should I criticize the doctor?
No, I should be smart enough know that the doctor was selling.
Yeah, he was marketing a fifty thousand dollar knee as compared to a ten dollars shot or whatever it was. Yeah. Okay, so he was in the money business and there weren't any Ethics involved. Both were solutions, but he was going where the money was, and that was $50,000 operation.
That's the problem we have with insurance at healthcare. The costs have to be managed somehow.
But on the other hand, the point I make is we can argue about how we set the system up, but they can't lie to us.
And I, where I started this, this interview was these two people that did unthinkable things of killing these two individuals.
I can see some commonality there because we've lost faith in the system.
And I'm a, I'm a poster child for it. I know how badly the health care system is lying to us.
But let me give you an answer or a solution.
[00:18:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:44] Speaker C: After writing the book. It's not in the book. I should have thought of it prior to writing the book, but I didn't.
I was too busy telling people what's wrong. And then there's a whole list of how to make the system work for you.
So that's all in the book.
But there's another thing you could do up front that I, I just overlooked.
When you go in, particularly a hospital, you're going to get a piece of paper. It's a long form, whole bunch of stuff typically titled Patient responsibility. What is it? Patient rights and responsibilities.
Okay. And you'll go through the whole thing and at the bottom of it, it'll typically say, and you agree to pay for whatever your insurance fails to pay.
And then you have to sign it.
Okay, well, you have a right to add a couple words, and I would advise, and I do it now, and I've done it now several times. The following words, My signature is void if billing me is barred by law, regulation or contract.
I haven't said no, I won't pay.
I've only said, you can't bill me on my signature.
If you're not allowed to bill me, I'm not going to waive that.
And I assure you it will. It's a simple solution for what they're doing.
And rather than go to war and try to argue with him and fight, just add that the next time you go in a hospital because it invalidate the bill, you have no right. And the last thing they're going to want to do is discuss it because one, they're not allowed to because of the provisions in the contract, bar it, and the other side, it opens a can of worms. There is no way they're going to want to open.
So what do they do?
They walk away from the bill. They just walk away.
Now One thing I didn't mention to you in these contracts, in the very first part of these contracts, they assign every in network provider the obligation to provide you all the care your doctor prescribes as necessary.
So if your doctor says you need it, they have to provide it. Contractually, they're required to.
They just don't want you to know that.
What they want you to do is allow their doctor to argue with your doctor whether it's the right thing.
And now I'm going to go into the law a little bit. Their doctor has no standing.
The law says only your doctor can determine the care you need.
And that is why their doctor will never see you, will never review your medical record, will never come close to touching you or the issue, because if they touch it, then they have liability for them and the insurance company.
So what you're doing when you allow them to argue, well, our doctor says this, so we're not going to cover it.
You're allowing an argument that should have no, no relevance, no place. And what you should be saying is, and this is in the book, you should simply say your doctor has no standing. I don't care what they say.
Your obligation is to provide what my doctor says I need.
But now we're back to the big lie. They. And, and this the underlying principle I started off with, and that is that we can no longer just trust the system to do what's right for us.
They're driven by too much money and too many other issues.
What you can do is my little magic words, as I call them. My signature is void, okay, if billing me is barred by law, regulation or contract strips all those contractual provisions away from them, all the power they have, and put you in a safe place.
The other thing is to know that your doctor is the only doctor that can determine the care you need. It works for you.
Because there is no corporate license to practice medicine, only one doctor. Okay. I'm an engineer as well as a pilot and all these other things. And I at one point signed a lot of.
Oh, boy. You still there?
[00:23:35] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:36] Speaker C: Okay. Something happened here.
Okay, I'm back.
I touched a key.
The.
The thing is, they want us to think they have all the power and they don't.
We have the power in law if we refuse to be rolled.
But you need to read my book, and I'm not selling books. I mean, I, I really don't care.
I'll never make.
I'll never make any money out of this book, but I really feel an obligation to share what took me so Long and was so hard to learn about our health insurance.
And I, and, and I guess I'm going to have to tie it to what we're seeing today in the national discourse.
Somehow we have to get back to being honest with each other.
Hey, look, if there's somebody in the system that wants to step forward and tell me where I'm wrong, I welcome it and I've welcomed it for years. They don't show up.
Okay, let me share one other thing with you.
Because of the way they've structured this system, the health insurance.
Hey, I'm not going to recommend this. I'm just going to share it. Okay.
Every year they change the plans that are available in health insurance.
Okay, well, how can they do that without changing contracts?
You as an individual, whether you buy it or you get it from an employer, don't have a contract. You may have a little booklet.
It tells you coverage and this or that, but that booklet has no value in law. You can't march into court and throw that book up there to a judge and tell them to enforce it.
There's no signature on it.
None.
It's. It's just a piece of paper.
What they do is because they have the right to pay as little as they want whenever they want.
They just.
This year we're going to pay less and next year they're going to pay even less.
But their obligation not to bill you yet give you all the care you need remains in that original unchanged contract since 1990.
So what you might do is just take the cheapest possible policy form plan that you could find and then be ready to go back in and go, well, wait a minute. You have no right to bill me and you still have to give me the best care that my doctor prescribes.
And you'd have them. They'd be in trouble because the last thing they want to do is fight over it because they'd have to go into court and share the very information we've just discussed.
There are ways to make this system.
If I can convey anything today. Yeah, I have a book and I really would hope people would take a look at it. Took a lot of work.
But if I can convey anything to you, we can make the system work for us because the laws that were there for our parents are still there.
They haven't changed the law, not as it comes to health care and insurance.
It's just that the insurance industry has done a masterful job of making us think they've changed things and they do it through coverage.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: I agree with Your family.
You should write another book about everything you've done in your life.
Your very great auditor.
And so thank you for your candor. When did you start suing the insurance company?
For eight years.
[00:27:45] Speaker C: Oh, good. You're talking almost ancient history.
I would have sued them somewhere.
Oh, I'm going to have to guess right around 2000.
[00:27:57] Speaker B: Well, see, the reason why I asked, it's because I want to get a timeline of.
How long you've been deep diving into this topic and trying to figure it out.
And if suing a insurance company.
I just want to give people a realistic look at the timeline.
You've got some years on this subject.
And it all stemmed from a family tragedy, which I hate to say it. It's probably more relatable than people know, or that insurance or hospitals would like to admit.
You, you mentioned early on that you wrote four books on health care.
People don't do that, judge for kids or because they're bored out of their mind. Health care is a complicated subject and so you done your homework. And I'm trying to impress that upon the legion in view.
[00:29:55] Speaker C: Look, I will readily admit I'm a little different than the average guy. I've done a lot of things and I've seen a lot of average, not average people, different people.
They hurt me deeply and, and they lied to me and they barred me in what I viewed was a, a, an American right.
And I took it personally.
And I fortunately had the background and the, the fortitude to fight them. No, I certainly couldn't have done it with an attorney. It couldn't afford it. Eight years of an attorney, my God, I wouldn't have a cent in the world.
I'd be living on the street.
So I was my own attorney through all of that. And so I had to learn not only what they were doing and fight them. I had to learn how to be an attorney.
Now what did help me was I was a lead in the Clean Air act down in Washington and one head to head with Morgan Lewis and Bacchus, Bill Lewis. It was as big as you could get in the litigation field around environmental law. I can still remember Bill Lewis. He's on one side of a table and I was on the other. And Bill screaming at me, red in the face, screaming, are you an attorney? Are you an attorney? And I said, no, Bill, but I can read the law just like you did. Or you can. And he went nuts.
But what I'm saying is I just really, I feel it's repulsive when, when people lie to people who don't understand people take their power and use it against people who can't fight back.
Okay? And I was determined to share what I had learned through my own personal experience.
And so like, I went to the head of the, of the, of the legislature in Pennsylvania and he and I got together.
And at that time, I really believed it was just a Pennsylvania issue.
And we wrote legislation to correct the Pennsylvania legislation.
And he came back to me and he said, frank, I'm sorry, I can't do it. I can't even move it out of committee.
They won't let me.
And he just withdrew and it, you know, that went away. So I got angry and I wrote a law book. The second book I wrote is actually a pretty good law book.
And I thought that would turn the key.
And it did not.
People just walk away like a nationally ranked constitutional attorney saying to me, I'm not saying you're wrong.
We just don't want to deal with it.
And so what you have is there's just so much money.
We're talking trillions of dollars.
Okay.
I was in a room with, we were talking about $5 billion in liability, and I'll keep it reasonably simple.
And the four of us in that room suddenly realized that we had the information that would have exposed our company to a five billion dollar settlement.
And what did we do?
We all got up and walked out of the room. Never said another word about would have killed us.
I don't mean dead, but career wise, you can't stand up and against $5 billion, well, this is, this is $4.3 trillion.
Now, the good news is, is at least I'm convinced that you and I, no one else is going to change this system.
Very recently I had an attorney come to me and saw my stuff and I wanted to talk and so forth. And when she realized that I really knew what I was talking about, boy, did she disappear.
Even though she is a nationally ranked advocate for patient rights and individual rights and so forth, but it suddenly bang. And was she gone.
[00:34:22] Speaker B: So she.
[00:34:23] Speaker C: You're talking about a career.
This is not where you make a career.
[00:34:29] Speaker B: No, no, just let me make sure I got that correct way.
She sought you out, and then.
[00:34:45] Speaker C: When.
[00:34:45] Speaker B: She learned how much you knew about the subject, she disappeared.
[00:34:55] Speaker C: And then, boy, she disappeared. Let me, let me explain something else, like why did it take me so long to understand it to the degree I, I do understand it? Just say within the past month, I recognized something that I had overlooked that's really significant.
I told you earlier that the States wrote these contracts or the requirements for these contracts way back in 1990. And so these contracts have been around forever.
However, what the states never recognized was once they wrote them under their auspices, their right to regulate insurance and then have them put in a private contract, they lost all right to change them.
Because while a state has every right to legislate requirements for health care and insurance, once those provisions are entered into a private contract, both the state and the federal government under the U.S. constitution lose their authority to change the contracts.
Okay? The contracts provision does not allow either the state or the federal government to go in and make changes in a private contract because there's nothing in these contracts that's illegal.
Okay? These are smart people.
These are smart people.
So it's why I love my little, what I call, magic words.
If I could leave anything with you, my signature is void. If billing me is barred by law, regulation and contract.
If, if you remember that and do it and at the same time remember that your doctor is the only voice with authority in what you get, you can make this system work for you because it turns their system on its head and they don't dare argue it.
[00:37:08] Speaker B: Well, Frank, you said a lot of interesting stuff.
And to summarize it for our readers, our listeners and our viewers, excuse me. I like to think that both people with disabilities and those who have yet to discover and embrace their own disabilities listen and watch this show.
But I'm not naive to think that both groups take away the same thing from every episode.
And so as my gets, what do you hope that people with disabilities take away from the zebisode? And what do you hope that people who have yet to discover or embrace their disabilities take away from their zeppet zone?
[00:38:30] Speaker C: I would say this to you.
Life is decision and risk.
If you have disability, the system doesn't really want to pay for. Your disability has nothing to do with anything other than money.
And so you have a risk.
And you could read the book and you could try to understand the entire health care scheme. It's there.
But I'm going to argue you can get almost there by doing nothing more than writing.
My signature is void if billing me is barred by law, regulation and contract, and coupling that with, hey, wait a minute, my doctor is the only doctor with standing in this matter.
Okay? Period.
If you did those two things, you basically gut the system that they are counting on to.
To lie to you.
That's it.
I mean, they think that they're able to tell you that their doctor is equal to your doctor in what you Need.
No, no, no, that's not true.
And the other thing is they want you to believe it's insurance because if it really was insurance, you would owe whatever your insurer doesn't pay, right? Yeah, but it's not insurance.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: No.
[00:40:08] Speaker C: And there's a provision in the law that says if you acknowledge something against your own interests, it could be viewed by the court as accurate. So when you sign this little piece of paper, even though you don't own the bill, you accept it.
So if you put those little magic words of mine on top of your signature, which you have every right to do, you invalidate the whole thing and put yourself in charge.
Take charge of the bill, take charge of the doctor.
That's health care. If I can control my doctor, what he's describing, prescribing, and I can protect myself financially, I'm in control of my health care, but I need both.
And if people will take anything from this discussion session, please seriously consider every time you enter. And by the way, I would not do this to my doctor.
I'm going to pay my doctor. I'm going to deal with my doctor because he's every much a victim in this mess as we are.
But I'm not going into a hospital or a special care or whatever facility without adding those magic words, okay? And I will never listen to an insurance company tell me that their doctor believes. I'm just going to cut them off right at the pass.
I'm going to, you know, your doctor has no standing. I do not care what your doctor thinks. End the conversation.
You know, most wins in whether it's, it's, it's technical, whatever is, is setting the ground rules. So the discussions on your terms. Why in the devil do you want to listen to what somebody else's doctor has to say about your situation?
No, no, no, no. That's not the law and that's not what I would accept.
So what I hope that we can take away from this discussion is we all have needs and we have to. And we have a right to honesty.
And the system is no longer honest.
However, fortunately, there are a couple very little things we can do. Simple things to turn it to our favor.
My magic words and the recognition that the doctor license requires that he works for you. And the only opinion that's of any merit under law is his.
What your insurance company thinks is academic.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Well, Frank, thank you so much for coming on and sharing so much of a.
Of your life story and of the work you do and why it's so passionate to you as we go. If someone wants to buy your book or subscribe to your email newsletter or get in touch with you directly, how would they do that?
[00:43:46] Speaker C: There's, there's contact information in the book and the website killabill.com also provides the opportunity to contact me. And I will, I will reply to you the, the most direct way to get the book. But you can get it on Amazon. But you could just go to killabill.com and there's, there's a QR code there that'll take you right to the book.
And there's a bunch of additional information to help you understand some of this stuff.
But I can be contacted through the website.
[00:44:21] Speaker B: Well, Frank, thank you again for coming on. I've enjoyed this discussion and I hope it has been helpful to all listeners and viewers.
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Thank you very much for the opportunity to have the session. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I sure hope I served your, your listeners well.
[00:44:46] Speaker B: Thank you. Take care of yourself, okay?
[00:44:57] Speaker A: You have been listening to Disability Empowerment Now. I would like to thank my guests.
You go.
And the Disability Empowerment now team that made this episode possible.
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[00:46:01] Speaker B: YouTube.
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