How many of you have truly been screwed over by an insurance company?

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I, a doctor

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Pretty sure

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by Hopeful Doc

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Name checks out

A woman backed into my car in a parking lot. It took 5 months for it to be repaired due to difficulty getting parts. Her insurance company agreed to rent me a car for 6 days. I used to think that if an accident was not your fault, you would have no out of pocket expenses. I was wrong.

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I, a doctor who deals with them daily, see them do at least one egregious thing a day.

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Some dweebs on here told me insurance is just trying to bring our costs down but those mean old doctors and anesthesiologists keep over-billing

I’ve never really needed to claim anything. All I know if that when I was in high school our house was robbed and I got a bunch of brand new awesome shite. Insurance rocks. Insurance has also been great for my mom and her house flooding multiple times. Seems to be working as intended?

I tried to get ozempic but all they would approve is Lizzo.

well they fricked around with my Harvey claim

Yeah, after Ida. We had to get the Louisiana Department of Insurance involved all over a
$2,000 claim. It wasn’t so much about the money VS the insurance company doing what we pay them for.

I can only speak for auto insurance as I work in this industry however I’d imagine other insurance industries operate the same way

The insurance company is there to pay what it is legally obligated to pay. Nothing more and nothing less.

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Some dweebs on here told me insurance is just trying to bring our costs down but those mean old doctors and anesthesiologists keep over-billing

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We aren’t doing bad, overall. But if you quit paying all doctors today and they still worked, you’d cut costs between 8-15%, depending on the source you read (a google of “physician reimbursement as a percentage of healthcare dollars spent” will find you a lot of sources and graphs with those rough ranges).

I’m in a small office. 2 docs, 1 NP.
We have a nurse whose entire job is to get authorizations for imaging, procedures, hospital stays, etc approved. Each of our nurses individually have to get PAs on medications. We have a separate nurse whose entire job is to check insurance benefits so patients know their copay, deductible, planned expenses.


This doesn’t include the billing department who actually fights the claims, denials. They do have a few other duties. But accepting insurance on behalf of my patients costs me roughly 3 full time employees (if considering the two billers that do other things as one person working full time in an insurance-facing manner (and about one other 3/4-FTE for the other duties, but it makes sense with our workflows to split them up in that way)


And then when any of them gets denied with the documentation I’ve supplied, I get on the line with another doctor and argue the case. This doesn’t cost the patient anything from me. And the insurance company doesn’t pay me to do it. But I’ll probably spend an hour or so a month directly on the phone (excluding chart review, pulling guidelines, etc). The insurance banks on some percentage of cases being not worth the ordering physician’s time, so they can get away with denying the care because they offered appeal if thought to be inappropriate and the resource wasn’t used. That percentage that they don’t have to pay for (or delay payment for) is worth a lot of money to them.