I frequently have to deal with this, particularly peer-to-peer (P2P) authorization. I have never been assigned a practising oncologist as a peer. Often a retired unrelated speciality (paediatrician, psychiatrist) or a non-practising insurance doctor. They are unfamiliar with any of the data in the field, and they read off cards provided to them by their "third party" employer to deny care, even care that falls within national guidelines. I had to escalate this to the CMO of the insurance company before, at which time they admitted that the treatment should have been approved from the beginning. Their goal is to make the process frustrating ("just call this number..." it's a phone tree), introduce delays ("please fax your appeal to this garbage can and we will consider looking at it between 72 hours and never"), require multiple layered appeals ("so I'm just the peer to a peer reviewer, and my guidelines say to deny this, but you are welcome to appeal to a panel that might read the references you already sent in"), and anything else to ensure that patients stop pursuing care and die before getting expensive drugs.
It is never based on quality care, but on increasing friction and pain in the system in order to minimize payments out of money already collected from patients. It is a criminal racket and nothing makes me angrier in my entire practice.
Does anyone know if this service exists? E.g. if they deny, you don't even talk to them, you forward it straight to your insurance insurance and their lawyer instantly threatens to sue them?
Some employers will have healthcare concierges that help with resolving such issues. An example is HealthAdvocate[1] (no relation). I believe some of these services will take a cut (e.g. 25%) of the money they save for you.
I cannot speak to how effective these services are. My general experience with "proxy" services have not been great, due to inadequate care or training.
So we pay people to deny coverage, and then we also pay people to deny the denying. Broken Window Theory hard at work!
It's the societal version of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "dynamic tension." Just muscles pulling against muscles for their own sake, with no actual work getting done. Surely this is a recipe for downfall.
It does! It's called supplemental insurance and is specially for when insurance denies your claim. It's quite nice since the event is simple to get covered. You have the denial letter from insurance and a statement from your doctor that says it's medically necessary and you're done.
I don't know the specific plan since it's through $employer but it's through Aflac. I actually hope my insurance denies me now because it's better, they pay in full and I don't have to be in-network.
Here and in taxes complexity is a problem. Any chem Eng or Drucker/Ishikawa/Deming person will want to simplify.
Second, and as a commentor here reminds, patients are often on the line for money (accountability) when the axis of control (the other side of same coin) is between the hospital and insurer.
Every time accountability is separated from control you've get big problems, and incentives to do the wrong thing.
Variations include providers over billing, billing wrong procedure etc. or denying claims on the other side.
All that stuff is done electronically between the provider and insurer (an axis of control) without the insured ever even knowing. Thus bad providers see the patient's policy like a wallet found on the ground.
Contrast with most commercial transactions: the service provider has no/none/zero access to any customer money directly or indirectly. All the provider can do is bill the customer (with an itemized bill). This way the customer decides if they part with money instead of the provider helping themselves to money.
I could add my own horror stories .. but will not waste your time.
I would love to see in the next 20 years,
- accurate itemized bills from hospitals/providers
- bills submitted to patients and only patients. Provider access to patient's insurance cutoff.
- patients if they agree electronically submit to their insurance giving them incentive to not commit fraud and use their benefits smartly
- providers and insurers who mostly work between each other put the insured in the center of the picture
- which requires providers and insurers to simplify and bring their business practice more in line with everybody else.
Yes, health care billing is more complicated than buying a car or upgrading your bathroom, but I harbor the suspicion that patients can do a lot more and insurance people act like it's impenetrable through self inflicted and self injected complexity.
The angle I would love to hear is that these people denying medical care are not culpable for the consequences. If I don’t order a test/surgery/whatever and the patient is harmed, I may face civil or criminal liability. But if the insurer refuses to authorize care (which, in practice, means the care doesn’t happen) and the patient suffers harm they have no recourse. The argument is that the insurance company isn’t making a medical decision - you can still get the surgery your doctor recommended, we just won’t pay for it! - although in practice their decision /does/ dictates care.
So if they are making medical decisions, why aren’t they liable for the consequences? Sometimes the “peer” denying care doesn’t even have a medical license!
Evicore is a highly suspicious company, and the story of the patient who passed away in this article is sad. But I have noticed insurers do this (false claim denials) all on their own too. I and many friends have experienced Aetna routinely denying things that are explicitly covered by their plans and mentioned in the plan documents. They force you into an exhaustive cat and mouse game of chasing their team to reprocess denied claims. But after the initial denial, every conversation goes to some other part of their support team with hour long waiting times (meaning you may have to try multiple times across multiple weeks due to other obligations in your schedule), incompetent staff that barely speak English (making it hard to get the info or action you want), and very loose commitments from Aetna (they’ll promise getting back in 45 business days but even with that they won’t have done anything when you check in weeks later). I think these are purposeful games meant to deter people from successfully filing claims, by exhausting them, or simply shifting their payments into the future. I feel it is criminal. Not just in terms of fraudulent denial but in affecting people’s health by creating stress for them over big medical bills that should be covered.
It's not even just insurance companies. My wife and I had a child earlier this year, uncomplicated natural birth, fully covered under insurance. However the hospital initially filed the claim incorrectly, causing the claim to be denied and us to receive a bill in the thousands well in excess of our deductible/coinsurance.
Hours of phone calls to insurance and hospital later, we think we have it resolved but are informed it may take up to 6 weeks to process. Fine, we wait six weeks. Hospital starts threatening to send us to collections for non-payment. Hours of phone calls later it turns out they were waiting on information from insurance that they never received. So six phone calls later we think we've gotten it all sorted out. This time people actually follow through, hospital switches our payment to pending and that's the last we heard of it. Got confirmation that insurance paid out several months later.
Again, the hospital messed up the paperwork, but the burden of solving the problem falls on us, with serious financial consequences if we don't. While we're dealing with a newborn no less. There should really be a law that makes institutions liable for such errors.
Also insurance was a little shady as well. The amount of the outstanding bill should have pushed us over our out-of-pocket-max for the year, but when they finally paid out they marked it as an "adjustment". Which means we're still in the coinsurance part of plan. So we're getting deeply discounted healthcare for the rest of the year, but not free. It's not worth the time for us to run down, and maybe they're doing everything in line with the fine print, but it definitely smells rotten.
I'm in a similar situation now. I don't understand why the insurance company and the hospital billing staff can't talk to each other, and require me to act as a mediator. At this point it feels malicious.
In all practical ways, it is malicious. The system is intentionally designed to pay out as few claims as legally possible and use every legal means to obstruct and draw out the claims process. The U.S. healthcare system as a whole is a bastion of inefficiency and corruption.
Fun thing about small claims (once had to sue a bad landlord, eventually settled out of court), even if you win you have to extract payment. That means you need to figure out which banks have which accounts you want to garnish and contact them, which properties to put liens on, etc or hire a collections firm to do that.
I suppose an institution might be more willing to just pay up and be done with it, but if they want to make it costly they very much can, even if the judge immediately sides with you. Often negates what you would have "won", particularly if you factor in time.
"Could" is the operative word, just as likely you'll end up exchanging one form of time/money/stress for another. If you want the satisfaction that your money went to the courts/lawyers/collection's agencies rather than the entity who wronged you, fine, but that's about the best you can hope for below a certain dollar amount.
Also you have to prove damages, back when we were suing the landlord I brought up throwing on lost wages for the time I had to take off work to deal with the illegal stuff we were suing over, and our lawyer said "yeah we can try but it's unlikely the judge will award that because you weren't forced to take that time off". There's all sorts of gotchas like that.
That experience really opened my eyes to how the system really does screw the average person. I'm upper middle class and extremely well educated, so is the rest of my family who were supporting us throughout. I can't imagine how someone making the median salary who reads at a 5th grade level would navigate it. That's probably what said scummy landlord was counting on and why he settled when it was clear we weren't easy targets.
The system serves the common man reluctantly at best. Justice is a luxury good.
Why is small claims court better than a law flipping the default liability?
It's basically insane that we require individuals to sign a blanket billing authorization prior to receiving care. Perhaps the hospital should have to provide a maximum amount that is at risk (hopefully creating pressure to operate in a sensible way).
And what voter would ever want things to be this way? What constituent, rich or poor, conservative or liberal, says "ya know, I like paying for healthcare even when I have insurance and I'm going to keep voting for the one who keeps this status quo!" ?
Some very clever people have architectected an effective scam to prevent the democratic system from solving this. And I'm not referring to a republicans vs democrats debate about free socialized care vs hands off privatization. I'm talking about little steps that chip away at the problem like the one you described. Or forcing them to pay first, and only later have a debate about it. Or holding insurance liable for injury resulting from denying coverage. There is plenty of room for improvement and yet the representatives manage to accomplish nothing along these lines.
Our situation and many friends is the same thing - uncomplicated birth. There was no error in how the claim was filed - just an unexplained denial. Which then led to a long drawn out process that required time and stress. All when you’re trying to focus on your child. I think insurance companies like Aetna target new mothers in particular, knowing they’re too busy and exhausted to deal with hours of phone calls. We deserve and want compensation for that time and stress.
When it appears a legitimate claim is going to be denied, I recommend immediately opening a case with your state’s insurance regulator. If it’s an employer sponsored plan, the Dept of Labor. Success is not assured, but it creates a paper trail for regulators and other interested parties, including attorneys you might eventually involve.
That’s a great tip. I remember wanting to report this to some authority then but just didn’t have the time to deal with it. I wonder if I can still do it now after this has been settled (the claim was eventually paid, months late, after many many hours spent on phone calls).
> I and many friends have experienced Aetna routinely denying things that are explicitly covered by their plans and
My dad passed away from cancer over 20 years ago, and this was Aetna's plan even then. Each claim followed the exact same process of deny, approve but pay only pay a fraction, and then finally pay the correct amount. Literally every single claim. My mom built an automation in Excel to track the calls for each claim and to prompt her at the various time intervals required to follow up at each phase.
Personally, I experienced this went I went to the ER with acute abdominal pain and ended up having emergency surgery within a few hours. Naturally, Aetna tried to deny that my ER visit was an actual emergency. On the phone with the rep, I asked them if they new of any non-emergency situations where someone was able to have a surgery scheduled only 4 hours in advance. They agreed that it was an emergency and promptly paid $8k of the $16k bill. After another call several months later, they paid all but $800.
A few years ago, as my rebellion ramped up, I enrolled in a Christian Health Sharing Ministry. They published extensive disclaimers, telling members, "THIS IS NOT INSURANCE. DO NOT TREAT IT LIKE INSURANCE. WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU CARRY REAL INSURANCE."
Of course, I couldn't afford both the Health Share and real insurance, so I took the risk. But it soon became apparent that I was in over my head.
I barely understood the whole insurance claims/billing process. I had not been too involved, since Medicaid coverage had made a lot of that effortless and invisible.
So I had to learn about all these billing practices, and what's more, the Health Share had their own terminology that was parallel, but not equivalent, to insurance terminology. Thankfully, they published a detailed Lexicon document, in addition to their Sharing Guidelines.
All claims (Medical Needs) were manual. No providers would directly bill the HSM. The bills they sent to me were useless for this purpose. I needed to cajole each provider into generating an itemized "SuperBill" with all the info required for the HSM. Then I'd submit it to the HSM and literally pray.
I put up with this for a couple of years. I heard from other people how draining it was to deal with all this. So I finally withdrew. Now I carry regular Marketplace insurance.
But I'm descending into a hellscape of bureaucracy, and I'm scared of it. For years I've been trying to advocate for my health and reduce my health care costs by refusing unnecessary treatments that were making me sicker, and worsening my conditions.
But the insurance company seems hell bent on sending me on fool's errands and wild goose chases. For example, I didn't receive any billing communication for two months. Then, AutoPay failed last month. They sent me incorrectly-worded warning notices. I went around and around with CSRs about this. Finally we kicked the can down the road. They assured me that my insurance wouldn't terminate as it had been threatened.
But now my PCP's office is coming back to me with denials from 6 months ago. I'm tearing my hair out. Indeed, why do I need to be in the loop? They are filing claims. Their billing department needs to work this out. I'm powerless to tell my [ex-]insurance carrier what to do. I already sent them proof of coverage! Leave me alone!
It's a nightmare, and I predict that it will eventually eat my entire life. Many elderly people are slaves to their physicians and specialists and medications. My own parents are on a constant treadmill of doctor's appointments, every week, blood draws, ridiculously complex medication rituals.
My sanity and faith in Christ is worth far more than cooperation with these mendacious, lying, thieving swine. Mark my words.
I frequently have to deal with this, particularly peer-to-peer (P2P) authorization. I have never been assigned a practising oncologist as a peer. Often a retired unrelated speciality (paediatrician, psychiatrist) or a non-practising insurance doctor. They are unfamiliar with any of the data in the field, and they read off cards provided to them by their "third party" employer to deny care, even care that falls within national guidelines. I had to escalate this to the CMO of the insurance company before, at which time they admitted that the treatment should have been approved from the beginning. Their goal is to make the process frustrating ("just call this number..." it's a phone tree), introduce delays ("please fax your appeal to this garbage can and we will consider looking at it between 72 hours and never"), require multiple layered appeals ("so I'm just the peer to a peer reviewer, and my guidelines say to deny this, but you are welcome to appeal to a panel that might read the references you already sent in"), and anything else to ensure that patients stop pursuing care and die before getting expensive drugs.
It is never based on quality care, but on increasing friction and pain in the system in order to minimize payments out of money already collected from patients. It is a criminal racket and nothing makes me angrier in my entire practice.
It's as if you need insurance for the insurance.
Does anyone know if this service exists? E.g. if they deny, you don't even talk to them, you forward it straight to your insurance insurance and their lawyer instantly threatens to sue them?
Some employers will have healthcare concierges that help with resolving such issues. An example is HealthAdvocate[1] (no relation). I believe some of these services will take a cut (e.g. 25%) of the money they save for you.
I cannot speak to how effective these services are. My general experience with "proxy" services have not been great, due to inadequate care or training.
[1] https://www.healthadvocate.com/site/product-index/engagement...
So we pay people to deny coverage, and then we also pay people to deny the denying. Broken Window Theory hard at work!
It's the societal version of Kurt Vonnegut Jr's "dynamic tension." Just muscles pulling against muscles for their own sake, with no actual work getting done. Surely this is a recipe for downfall.
It does! It's called supplemental insurance and is specially for when insurance denies your claim. It's quite nice since the event is simple to get covered. You have the denial letter from insurance and a statement from your doctor that says it's medically necessary and you're done.
Do you have an example provider/plan?
I don't know the specific plan since it's through $employer but it's through Aflac. I actually hope my insurance denies me now because it's better, they pay in full and I don't have to be in-network.
That's really cool, cheers
Here and in taxes complexity is a problem. Any chem Eng or Drucker/Ishikawa/Deming person will want to simplify.
Second, and as a commentor here reminds, patients are often on the line for money (accountability) when the axis of control (the other side of same coin) is between the hospital and insurer.
Every time accountability is separated from control you've get big problems, and incentives to do the wrong thing.
Variations include providers over billing, billing wrong procedure etc. or denying claims on the other side.
All that stuff is done electronically between the provider and insurer (an axis of control) without the insured ever even knowing. Thus bad providers see the patient's policy like a wallet found on the ground.
Contrast with most commercial transactions: the service provider has no/none/zero access to any customer money directly or indirectly. All the provider can do is bill the customer (with an itemized bill). This way the customer decides if they part with money instead of the provider helping themselves to money.
I could add my own horror stories .. but will not waste your time.
I would love to see in the next 20 years,
- accurate itemized bills from hospitals/providers
- bills submitted to patients and only patients. Provider access to patient's insurance cutoff.
- patients if they agree electronically submit to their insurance giving them incentive to not commit fraud and use their benefits smartly
- providers and insurers who mostly work between each other put the insured in the center of the picture
- which requires providers and insurers to simplify and bring their business practice more in line with everybody else.
Yes, health care billing is more complicated than buying a car or upgrading your bathroom, but I harbor the suspicion that patients can do a lot more and insurance people act like it's impenetrable through self inflicted and self injected complexity.
The angle I would love to hear is that these people denying medical care are not culpable for the consequences. If I don’t order a test/surgery/whatever and the patient is harmed, I may face civil or criminal liability. But if the insurer refuses to authorize care (which, in practice, means the care doesn’t happen) and the patient suffers harm they have no recourse. The argument is that the insurance company isn’t making a medical decision - you can still get the surgery your doctor recommended, we just won’t pay for it! - although in practice their decision /does/ dictates care.
So if they are making medical decisions, why aren’t they liable for the consequences? Sometimes the “peer” denying care doesn’t even have a medical license!
Decent point. Here again the goal is to align accountability with control, which has got to be management 101.
Evicore is a highly suspicious company, and the story of the patient who passed away in this article is sad. But I have noticed insurers do this (false claim denials) all on their own too. I and many friends have experienced Aetna routinely denying things that are explicitly covered by their plans and mentioned in the plan documents. They force you into an exhaustive cat and mouse game of chasing their team to reprocess denied claims. But after the initial denial, every conversation goes to some other part of their support team with hour long waiting times (meaning you may have to try multiple times across multiple weeks due to other obligations in your schedule), incompetent staff that barely speak English (making it hard to get the info or action you want), and very loose commitments from Aetna (they’ll promise getting back in 45 business days but even with that they won’t have done anything when you check in weeks later). I think these are purposeful games meant to deter people from successfully filing claims, by exhausting them, or simply shifting their payments into the future. I feel it is criminal. Not just in terms of fraudulent denial but in affecting people’s health by creating stress for them over big medical bills that should be covered.
It's not even just insurance companies. My wife and I had a child earlier this year, uncomplicated natural birth, fully covered under insurance. However the hospital initially filed the claim incorrectly, causing the claim to be denied and us to receive a bill in the thousands well in excess of our deductible/coinsurance.
Hours of phone calls to insurance and hospital later, we think we have it resolved but are informed it may take up to 6 weeks to process. Fine, we wait six weeks. Hospital starts threatening to send us to collections for non-payment. Hours of phone calls later it turns out they were waiting on information from insurance that they never received. So six phone calls later we think we've gotten it all sorted out. This time people actually follow through, hospital switches our payment to pending and that's the last we heard of it. Got confirmation that insurance paid out several months later.
Again, the hospital messed up the paperwork, but the burden of solving the problem falls on us, with serious financial consequences if we don't. While we're dealing with a newborn no less. There should really be a law that makes institutions liable for such errors.
Also insurance was a little shady as well. The amount of the outstanding bill should have pushed us over our out-of-pocket-max for the year, but when they finally paid out they marked it as an "adjustment". Which means we're still in the coinsurance part of plan. So we're getting deeply discounted healthcare for the rest of the year, but not free. It's not worth the time for us to run down, and maybe they're doing everything in line with the fine print, but it definitely smells rotten.
I'm in a similar situation now. I don't understand why the insurance company and the hospital billing staff can't talk to each other, and require me to act as a mediator. At this point it feels malicious.
In all practical ways, it is malicious. The system is intentionally designed to pay out as few claims as legally possible and use every legal means to obstruct and draw out the claims process. The U.S. healthcare system as a whole is a bastion of inefficiency and corruption.
This is the answer.
> There should really be a law that makes institutions liable for such errors.
Does there need to be an explicit law?
Could one sue in small-claims court for the time and expense damages?
Fun thing about small claims (once had to sue a bad landlord, eventually settled out of court), even if you win you have to extract payment. That means you need to figure out which banks have which accounts you want to garnish and contact them, which properties to put liens on, etc or hire a collections firm to do that.
I suppose an institution might be more willing to just pay up and be done with it, but if they want to make it costly they very much can, even if the judge immediately sides with you. Often negates what you would have "won", particularly if you factor in time.
If nothing else, I assume it could defray any ostensibly-legitimate costs the hospital or service-provider is demanding from you.
"Could" is the operative word, just as likely you'll end up exchanging one form of time/money/stress for another. If you want the satisfaction that your money went to the courts/lawyers/collection's agencies rather than the entity who wronged you, fine, but that's about the best you can hope for below a certain dollar amount.
Also you have to prove damages, back when we were suing the landlord I brought up throwing on lost wages for the time I had to take off work to deal with the illegal stuff we were suing over, and our lawyer said "yeah we can try but it's unlikely the judge will award that because you weren't forced to take that time off". There's all sorts of gotchas like that.
That experience really opened my eyes to how the system really does screw the average person. I'm upper middle class and extremely well educated, so is the rest of my family who were supporting us throughout. I can't imagine how someone making the median salary who reads at a 5th grade level would navigate it. That's probably what said scummy landlord was counting on and why he settled when it was clear we weren't easy targets.
The system serves the common man reluctantly at best. Justice is a luxury good.
Why is small claims court better than a law flipping the default liability?
It's basically insane that we require individuals to sign a blanket billing authorization prior to receiving care. Perhaps the hospital should have to provide a maximum amount that is at risk (hopefully creating pressure to operate in a sensible way).
And what voter would ever want things to be this way? What constituent, rich or poor, conservative or liberal, says "ya know, I like paying for healthcare even when I have insurance and I'm going to keep voting for the one who keeps this status quo!" ?
Some very clever people have architectected an effective scam to prevent the democratic system from solving this. And I'm not referring to a republicans vs democrats debate about free socialized care vs hands off privatization. I'm talking about little steps that chip away at the problem like the one you described. Or forcing them to pay first, and only later have a debate about it. Or holding insurance liable for injury resulting from denying coverage. There is plenty of room for improvement and yet the representatives manage to accomplish nothing along these lines.
This reminds me of the recent Disney+ arbitration case...
https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/borders-on-the-absurd-dead-w...
Our situation and many friends is the same thing - uncomplicated birth. There was no error in how the claim was filed - just an unexplained denial. Which then led to a long drawn out process that required time and stress. All when you’re trying to focus on your child. I think insurance companies like Aetna target new mothers in particular, knowing they’re too busy and exhausted to deal with hours of phone calls. We deserve and want compensation for that time and stress.
When it appears a legitimate claim is going to be denied, I recommend immediately opening a case with your state’s insurance regulator. If it’s an employer sponsored plan, the Dept of Labor. Success is not assured, but it creates a paper trail for regulators and other interested parties, including attorneys you might eventually involve.
(volunteer patient advocate)
That’s a great tip. I remember wanting to report this to some authority then but just didn’t have the time to deal with it. I wonder if I can still do it now after this has been settled (the claim was eventually paid, months late, after many many hours spent on phone calls).
You can still file a complaint even if the issue has been resolved. It will be logged.
> I and many friends have experienced Aetna routinely denying things that are explicitly covered by their plans and
My dad passed away from cancer over 20 years ago, and this was Aetna's plan even then. Each claim followed the exact same process of deny, approve but pay only pay a fraction, and then finally pay the correct amount. Literally every single claim. My mom built an automation in Excel to track the calls for each claim and to prompt her at the various time intervals required to follow up at each phase.
Personally, I experienced this went I went to the ER with acute abdominal pain and ended up having emergency surgery within a few hours. Naturally, Aetna tried to deny that my ER visit was an actual emergency. On the phone with the rep, I asked them if they new of any non-emergency situations where someone was able to have a surgery scheduled only 4 hours in advance. They agreed that it was an emergency and promptly paid $8k of the $16k bill. After another call several months later, they paid all but $800.
A few years ago, as my rebellion ramped up, I enrolled in a Christian Health Sharing Ministry. They published extensive disclaimers, telling members, "THIS IS NOT INSURANCE. DO NOT TREAT IT LIKE INSURANCE. WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU CARRY REAL INSURANCE."
Of course, I couldn't afford both the Health Share and real insurance, so I took the risk. But it soon became apparent that I was in over my head.
I barely understood the whole insurance claims/billing process. I had not been too involved, since Medicaid coverage had made a lot of that effortless and invisible.
So I had to learn about all these billing practices, and what's more, the Health Share had their own terminology that was parallel, but not equivalent, to insurance terminology. Thankfully, they published a detailed Lexicon document, in addition to their Sharing Guidelines.
All claims (Medical Needs) were manual. No providers would directly bill the HSM. The bills they sent to me were useless for this purpose. I needed to cajole each provider into generating an itemized "SuperBill" with all the info required for the HSM. Then I'd submit it to the HSM and literally pray.
I put up with this for a couple of years. I heard from other people how draining it was to deal with all this. So I finally withdrew. Now I carry regular Marketplace insurance.
But I'm descending into a hellscape of bureaucracy, and I'm scared of it. For years I've been trying to advocate for my health and reduce my health care costs by refusing unnecessary treatments that were making me sicker, and worsening my conditions.
But the insurance company seems hell bent on sending me on fool's errands and wild goose chases. For example, I didn't receive any billing communication for two months. Then, AutoPay failed last month. They sent me incorrectly-worded warning notices. I went around and around with CSRs about this. Finally we kicked the can down the road. They assured me that my insurance wouldn't terminate as it had been threatened.
But now my PCP's office is coming back to me with denials from 6 months ago. I'm tearing my hair out. Indeed, why do I need to be in the loop? They are filing claims. Their billing department needs to work this out. I'm powerless to tell my [ex-]insurance carrier what to do. I already sent them proof of coverage! Leave me alone!
It's a nightmare, and I predict that it will eventually eat my entire life. Many elderly people are slaves to their physicians and specialists and medications. My own parents are on a constant treadmill of doctor's appointments, every week, blood draws, ridiculously complex medication rituals.
My sanity and faith in Christ is worth far more than cooperation with these mendacious, lying, thieving swine. Mark my words.
Don’t lose your faith in Christ, but beware those who claim to be his followers.
I’m sorry you’re having so many troubles with your insurance. I hope it gets resolved.