Casey Anthony walks to an SUV with her lawyer, Jose Baez, after she was released from the Orange County Jail in Orlando, Fla., early Sunday, July 17, 2011. (AP Photo)
ORLANDO, Florida (AP) — Casey Anthony was freed from a Florida jail early Sunday, 12 days after she was acquitted of murder in the death of her 2-year-old daughter Caylee in a verdict that drew furious responses and even threats from people across the U.S. who had followed the case with rapt attention.
Anthony, wearing a pink T-shirt with blue jeans, left the jail at 12:14 a.m. local time with her attorney, Jose Baez. She was given $537.68 in cash from her jail account and escorted outside by two sheriff’s deputies armed with semi-automatic rifles. Neither Anthony nor Baez said anything to reporters and others gathered outside.
She then climbed into an SUV with her attorney and sped off, destination unknown. News helicopters trailed them for a while.
Anthony, 25, had been finishing her four-year sentence for telling investigators several lies, including that Caylee was kidnapped by a nonexistent nanny. With credit for the nearly three years she’s spent in jail since August 2008 and good behavior, she had only days remaining when she was sentenced July 7.
“This release had an unusual amount of security so, therefore, in that sense, it would not be a normal release,” said Orange County Jail spokesman Allen Moore. “We have made every effort to not provide any special treatment for her. She’s been treated like every other inmate.
Moore said there were no known threats received at the jail. Officials had a number of contingency plans in place, including plans in case shots were fired as she was released.
Orange County Jail officials had planned to release Anthony sometime Sunday under circumstances they refused to disclose. Experts had said she would be released in the dead of night, and her defense team did their best to keep her away from the glare of the media spotlight.
However, more than a dozen television trucks already were outside the jail by noon Saturday, though the facility was otherwise quiet. Scores of reporters and cameramen surrounded the outside later on in the day, along with a few scattered protesters.
Crimesider’s complete coverage of Casey Anthony
How Casey Anthony’s release is likely to unfold
Casey Anthony to appeal verdict on lying charges
Video: Casey Anthony look-a-like feared for life
One of her attorneys, Cheney Mason, said Friday that Anthony was scared to leave jail, given numerous threats on her life and the scorn of a large segment of the public that believes she had something to do with the death of her daughter, Caylee.
Anthony was acquitted of first-degree murder in Caylee’s death earlier this month. She was found guilty of four counts of lying to police, but with time served and good behavior credits, she didn’t have to serve out her four-year sentence.
Another attorney, Charles Greene, said Friday that Anthony was “emotionally unstable” and needed “a little breathing room” after the draining two-month trial.
That could be difficult, given the vitriol directed at Anthony. After the verdict, anger spilled onto social networks like Facebook and Twitter from people who had spent weeks watching the trial on local and cable television channels. On Friday, Anthony’s legal team said it had received an emailed death threat with a manipulated photo showing the 25-year-old woman with a bullet hole in her forehead. It has been forwarded to authorities. Officials had said earlier this week that they had not received any credible threats, but they did not return a phone call about that email.
In Orlando and elsewhere, many remain convinced Anthony isn’t totally innocent. David Waechter recorded the trial and watched it at home with his wife every day after work. He said Anthony was guilty of “something, for sure.”
“I’m perplexed. You know there is something there, but you don’t know what,” he said. “Yet she is getting out.”
Others who have witnessed Anthony’s saga with front-row seats said they were ready for the media attention to die down.
“Most people I talk to, they’re done with it,” Mandy Williams, a 38-year-old county parks employee, said outside a busy grocery story. “When it came out she was not guilty, people were ticked off.”
Steven Klosterman, who owns a property management company, said if Anthony were to stay in Orlando, “I think she’ll wind up like her daughter,” given the threats she has received.
“Good luck to her,” said Klosterman, 43. “She’s going to have a hard time.”
Above: Aisha Howard, 10 (left); Jordan Howard, 8 (center); and their mother Susan Hoch, all of Clearwater, Fla., protest the release of Casey Anthony outside the Booking and Release Center of the Orange County Jail in Orlando, Fla., Saturday, July 16, 2011. (AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
Security experts have said Anthony will need to hole up inside a safe house protected by bodyguards, perhaps for weeks, in case someone tries to make good on one of those threats. Ideally, several SUVs with tinted windows will pull up to the jail to whisk her away, probably in the middle of the night, the experts said. Jail officials have not disclosed when she will be released.
Exactly where she will go also remains unclear. It’s unlikely she’ll return to the home she once shared with her parents, as the trial left her family fractured. Defense attorney Jose Baez argued during the trial that Caylee accidentally drowned in the family pool and that Casey Anthony’s father, George, covered it up to make it look like a homicide. Baez also argued that George Anthony molested his daughter when she was a child — which resulted in psychological issues that caused her to lie and act without apparent remorse after Caylee went missing.
“Most of the time you can always go home, but she doesn’t have that option,” said Daniel Meachum, an Atlanta lawyer who has represented football star Michael Vick and actor Wesley Snipes. “Baez has to have somewhere for her to go for her to get herself together.”
Casey Anthony was convicted of telling detectives several lies in July 2008, when Caylee’s disappearance was reported. She said that Caylee had been kidnapped by a nonexistent nanny, among other things.
Caylee’s skeleton was found that December in some woods near the Anthony family home.
While defense attorneys argued that Caylee’s death was an accident, prosecutors alleged that Anthony suffocated her daughter with duct tape because motherhood interfered with her lust for a carefree life of partying with friends and spending time with her boyfriend. Jurors have told various media outlets that prosecutors didn’t prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt as required for a conviction — although most have added that they don’t think Anthony is innocent.
Copyright ©2011 CBS Interactive Inc
Kaiser News – Health insurance claim denied? Appeal, appeal, appeal
Posted by 4love2love on June 25, 2011
When Natasha Friedus’s son, Nofi, was born almost two years ago, her insurer refused to pay $1,500 of Friedus’s $7,500 hospital bill because she hadn’t gotten prior authorization for the hospital stay near her home in Seattle. The plan also sent a $600 bill to Nofi, because he’d neglected to inform the insurer that he’d be in the hospital for a few days. “Apparently he was supposed to call before being born,” Friedus says.
The new mother spent hours on the phone trying to sort out the problem, but she got nowhere. Finally, someone suggested appealing the decision to the insurer and asking for retroactive approval for her hospital stay. That did the trick, says Friedus, even though the insurer had never informed her that she could appeal the bills.
Under the 2010 health law, the situation should improve. Health plans will be required to inform members that they can appeal disputed claims internally within the health plan as well as to an independent review organization not affiliated with the health plan.
Coding is everything
As anyone who has tried to decipher a health plan’s “Explanation of Benefits” knows, coding is everything. That’s where many errors occur, experts agree. If the CPT (Current Procedural Terminology) code that describes the medical service or test you received doesn’t correspond to the ICD (International Statistical Classifications of Diseases) code that describes your diagnosis, your claim may well be denied, a decision that will probably be communicated via a “reason code” on your EOB.
Medical services aren’t the only thing that must be in sync with the diagnosis: “The CPT code needs to correlate with age and sex and place of service as well,” says Candice Butcher, head of Medical Billing Advocates of America, which helps consumers resolve medical billing problems. In other words, if the CPT code is for a routine physical for an adult, but the patient is a 10-year-old child, the claim will be denied, says Butcher.
Sometimes claims that appear to be denied because the treatment isn’t appropriate — a particular service isn’t considered “medically necessary,” for example, or is deemed “experimental or investigational” — are actually coding errors, say experts, because the diagnosis code is wrong, for example.
You can’t prevent providers from miscoding your care or insurers from misinterpreting your plan or eligibility, but you can ask your doctor or insurer to cross-reference the treatment with the diagnosis and make sure the two are in sync, says Nancy Davenport-Ennis, chief executive of the Patient Advocate Foundation, which works to resolve these and other problems with health insurance claims.
Phone calls didn’t work
Sometimes even seemingly straightforward billing problems take months to resolve. When Janet Wolfe was hospitalized in central Georgia following a diagnosis of lymphoma a few years ago, she received a $1,600 bill from the insurer because she had stayed in a private room, which their insurer would pay for only if there were no other options. The hospital had only private rooms, but despite numerous phone calls by her husband, Andrew, to try to sort out the problem, the insurer eventually sent the bill to a collection agency.
When the letter from the collection agency arrived, Andrew took it and drove to the hospital. He demanded to see someone who could address the issue. Eventually, with the help of the hospital’s chief financial officer, the insurer removed the charges. “No one was taking responsibility for fixing the problem,” he says.
Getting assistance
Such experiences illustrate the difficulty that people with serious illnesses may face when trying to manage their medical bills, says Stephen Finan, senior director of policy at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network. Having a family member or someone else to backstop the process is essential. “If [patients] get lost or overwhelmed, there’s someone else who can help them with this critical process,” he says.
Organizations such as the Patient Advocate Foundation are not the only sources of assistance: The new health law provided $30 million for state-based consumer assistance programs to help people appeal health plan decisions.
Claim denial rates vary significantly by insurer, according to the GAO report. In California, for example, the denial rate for six managed care insurers ranged from 6 percent to 40 percent in 2009. Whether you’re insured by a plan that kicks out many claims or only a few, it may pay to appeal. The study found that consumers were successful in appeals filed with insurers in 39 percent to 59 percent of cases. When they appealed to an independent reviewer, consumers prevailed roughly 40 percent of the time.
Before you file an appeal, talk with your insurer to understand why your claim was denied, says Cheryl Fish-Parcham, deputy director of health policy at Families USA, a patient advocacy organization. “The biggest mistake people make is that they write an appeal that doesn’t really address the reason for the denial,” she says.
Have questions for Michelle Andrews? Write to her at khnquestions@kff.org.
Andrews writes for Kaiser Health News an editorially independent news service and a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan healthcare policy research organization. Neither Kaiser Health News nor the foundation is affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
Copyright © 2011, Los Angeles Times
Posted in Commentaries, General, Health & Wellness Information | Tagged: 2010 health law, age, American Cancer Society's Cancer Action Network, annoying, appeal, appeal disputed claims internally, appeal health plan decisions, bill, billing and eligibility disagreements, Candice Butcher, central Georgia, Cheryl Fish-Parcham, chief executive, claim denial rates, claim denied, claims problems, coding, coding errors, collection agency, consumers, correspond, CPT, critical process, cross-reference, Current Procedural Terminology, denied claim, deputy director of health policy, describes, diagnosis, eligibility, EOB, experimental, Explanation of Benefits, Families USA, family member, GAO, Government Accountability Office, Health care, Health insurance, health insurer, health plan, hospital, hospital chief financial officer, hospitalized, hours, husband, ICD, inappropriate treatment, independent review organization, inform, Insurance, insurer refused, International Statistical Classifications of Diseases, investigational, Janet Wolfe, Kaiser News, LA Times, Los Angeles Times, lymphoma, Medical Billing Advocates of America, medical billing problems, medical bills, medical services, medically appropriate, medically necessary, Michelle Andrews, misinterpreting, Nancy Davenport-Ennis, Natasha Friedus, new mother, news, news service, Nofi, Organizations, patient advocacy organization, Patient Advocate Foundation, phone, phone calls, place of service, private room, process, providers, reason code, report, required, resolve, retroactive approval, Seattle, senior director of policy, serious illnesses, sex, sort out problem, state-based consumer assistance programs, Stephen Finan, United States | Comments Off