I spoke with more than 50 insurance experts, patients, lawyers, physicians and consumer advocates about building a tool anyone could use to navigate insurance appeals. Nearly everyone said the same thing: Great idea. But almost impossible to do.
For starters, she said bluntly, “we know everything is going to get denied.” It’s almost a given, she said, that the insurer will lose the first batch of records. “We often have to send records two or three times before they finally admit they actually received them. … They play all of these kinds of delaying games.”
Fucking evil. We need health care reform now. You can’t morally justify playing with people’s lives like this. The suits running investment firms that own the hospitals and the suits running the insurance companies will keep cancer treatment from a child because they want to spend their winters in Tahiti and their summers in Patagonia. We have to make this stop.
This happened to me twice. First, when I applied for long-term disability insurance through the insurer that my employer used. Second, when I applied for SSDI.
I am convinced that there is a policy of “losing” or “not receiving” documentation in order to discourage the patient from continuing to pursue their claim.
I have only managed to succeed because I retained an attorney (two, actually–one for the private insurance and one for SSDI). As a disabled person with limited ability to handle these things myself, I never would have been able to win the insurance money that I deserved. As the system intends.
Fucking evil. We need health care reform now. You can’t morally justify playing with people’s lives like this. The suits running investment firms that own the hospitals and the suits running the insurance companies will keep cancer treatment from a child because they want to spend their winters in Tahiti and their summers in Patagonia. We have to make this stop.
This happened to me twice. First, when I applied for long-term disability insurance through the insurer that my employer used. Second, when I applied for SSDI.
I am convinced that there is a policy of “losing” or “not receiving” documentation in order to discourage the patient from continuing to pursue their claim.
I have only managed to succeed because I retained an attorney (two, actually–one for the private insurance and one for SSDI). As a disabled person with limited ability to handle these things myself, I never would have been able to win the insurance money that I deserved. As the system intends.