Dan Gottry - Blog

Dan Gottry's Blog

Monday, September 18, 2006

Stiking Fear Into Hearts of Independents

With all the contraversy and discussions about Linkia, one particular trend should strike fear into the hearts of all independents, their patients AND may have implications for the FTC.

The implementation of taking over the Cigna provider network has been completed and termination letters have been sent to the providers that will not be in the network. Linkia is working with Cigna on building out the new network.

They have also signed a second provider, Great-West Life and Annuity Insurance Company for their network management agreement for their 2 million members.

Linkia is currently in discussions with all of the large regionals or national healthcare insurance and health management firms in the USA.

I wonder whether Cigna and Great West Life realize that millions of their policy holders are being treated by unlicensed and in many cases non-certified individuals providing O&P services in 39 states?

Where is the newly formed O&P Alliance and the Academy in all this? Do these organizations represent the interests of independents? Is this issue not worthy of them to provide a position statement to their members?

With all this occurring it is interesting to see from Dan Gottry's recent post "Hanger CEO Dumps Large Block of Stock" and Karl Entenmann's, CPO post "Linkia and Independents " as further reported on the link Hanger CEO Dumps Large Block
of Stock that Hanger insiders are liquidating stock holdings.

Anthony T. Barr

posted by Daniel Gottry at 12:28 PM