A breast cancer surgeon had to “scrub out mid-surgery” to call a UnitedHealthcare representative because the insurance giant questioned whether the procedure she was in the middle of performing was really necessary.
Dr. Elisabeth Potter posted her story to Instagram this week, and the post has gotten more than 221,000 likes.
Still wearing her scrub cap, Dr. Potter began her video saying, “It’s 2025, and navigating insurance has somehow just gotten worse.”
“we’ve done nothing and it’s gotten worse!”
that’s because you haven’t been playing the game.
$17,000 for a mole extraction? nah…
At this point if I ever switched jobs and the new employer had United Health Care I would politely thank them for their time and get up and walk out of the interview.
Unfortunately most people can’t be so picky as to walk out of an interview, but yeah we should normalize asking who the company insurance is through, and if it’s UHC, out.
F
I mean, maybe an interviewer will tell you what they have if you ask, but HR and the recruiters will not, and the company policy is going to be “you will get your employee handbook and benefits selection guide after starting.”
CEO got killed but everything still working as intended. For everyone who was worried I can bring relieve, UnitedHealthcare is still working well.
You guys need other kind of UHC.
If you need experts, most of them are members of post-soviet communist partues and know how to build Semashko system.
One cannot be a true medical doctor in the USA.
This is one of the reasons I want to be a night shift emergency medicine physician. No one is calling me at 2 in the morning to argue with me running a code for insurance reasons.
Yeah they’ll just deny it without talking to you and bankrupt your patient.
There’s special kinds of short-term Medicaid for emergency room treatment and associated hospitalization. And they can’t deny a resuscitation as “not medically necessary”.
Insurance companies are parasites killing their host.
Only when they start costing more than they’re expected to produce in future profits. So less like a parasite and more like a soulless corporate leech, because actual parasites at least want the host to survive until they can reproduce.
Medical insurance companies should be forced to also provide life insurance to the same customer.
Then they have incentive to keep their customers alive.
No, no, they should only be required to provide life insurance for deaths related to refused treatments, but the amount should be massive and punitive. Whoops, you died because we denied your treatment, your next of kin gets several times more than we could have hypothetically saved by denying the treatment.
You can’t make it a massive punitive amount of it’s general life insurance because everyone dies eventually. But you can if it’s for deaths related to a denied treatment, and you can make it high enough that the financial incentive is always in favor of approving necessary treatments.
Idk if it’s only for like 200k and the procedure costs more than that then they have an incentive to kill you
I think it’s sick that you can put 250k into your body to heal and that doesn’t increase the value of your body. Idk, makes life insurance that much more ghoulish.
In the current scenario, they have to pay nothing if they kill you. It’s just pure savings. In the other, they have to pay $200k.
That’s true but it’s a business. Yes they would prefer to pay nothing but if the law passed they had to cover life insurance then they straight up have a number to beat. If it’s gonna cost $200,001 to keep you alive then nope, denied.
Your logic is true, but what you’re forgetting is that they already have a number to beat, and it’s $0.
Technically the number is person’s insurance premium over expected natural lifespan. But that number is still going to be lower than medical expenses. Might as well be $0.
And they currently just deny everything and hope you don’t appeal.
Universal healthcare would have the same effect. The government would spend a lot more money on preventative care.
Preventative care is DIRT CHEAP compared to any treatment or management of any condition.
That… Doesn’t sound like a bad thing.
It’s not, I’m advocating for universal healthcare.
Looking at Canada and Sweden as models, they absolutely do. Getting an actual specialist appointment takes a long long time, but they do get there eventually. And they def do a better job at getting you the meds you need in a timely fashion.
Getting an actual specialist appointment takes a long long time
Well, thank the gods of capitalism that I only have to wait 5 months to see a specialist (for a basic intake appointment, mind you, not even one for any real treatment) for the debilitating spinal injury that is causing me severe pain and mobility issues every second of every day. I’d hate to have affordable universal health care that might make me wait to see a specialist.
I like this line of thinking, but I expect they’d just lobby to make the life insurance payout requirements lower than the expected cost of treatment.
Lobbying should be handled legally the same as bribes.
So a-ok as long as it happens after the thing is passed? Because then it’s just a tip.
At the very least there should be a law, forcing any health insurance to at least cover all costs needed to insure survival and long term health. And what is needed for survival and long term health is defined by the Doctor and not by the insurance company!!! Honestly, no idea why this is not law in any rich country in 2025!
I mean that’s basically all medicine besides some very specific aesthetic services. Even plastic surgeons do some amazing work sewing people’s faces back on after animal attacks and industrial accidents and whatnot. This is a medical journal article of an amazing facial reconstruction after a car crash but fair warning that in the initial images his face is basically… gone (Scary Link). I’ve also heard stories of general and trauma surgeons trying to find a plastics doctor at 2am to sew a toddler’s face back on after various accidents because while part of stitching anything up is minimizing scarring the delicate skin of a tiny face that has a lot more growing to do is just outside of their skillset once the injury is past a certain surface area.
All the other rich countries in 2025 just have free healthcare and don’t need that law.
We need to make it a crime to deny claims on necessary healthcare. 10x penalty (paid to the victim directly) for denial. 30x if they were denied using AI or an automated system.
Or, remove the ticks.
Make health insurance illegal. Single payer healthcare where all is approved.
Just make it not up to the insurance company. If the healthcare provider believes it’s necessary care, then the insurance company pays. Full stop. They get no say in the matter, and denial is not an option.
“But health insurance would become unprofitable!”, they’ll cry? Good. Necessity shouldn’t be exploited.
This would incentivize abuse of the system by quacks and malicious profiteers trying to overbill, but Medicare/Medicaid seem to manage that problem just fine through fraud laws/policies.
If the insurance company believes it’s actually unnecessary care, they can take up a complaint with the medical board and only get to claw back money if an independent panel of doctors in the same specialty agrees that it was unnecessary or unethical. A bonus from this is that insurance companies would have incentive to make sure doctors are well-trained to know what testing/treatment is actually warranted. Btw, “necessary” doesn’t only get to mean you get the minimum required to keep you from dying today; quality of life and long-term prognosis must be required considerations.
If the insurance company believes it’s fraud, they can take it up with law enforcement too.
Another thing that could help would be to make the medical/nursing/etc boards better equipped for investigation/enforcement of ethics complaints and to make disciplinary records follow those who would move to another state to get a new license, and also make those disciplinary records readily accessible by the public on a centralized national database. Bad actors will not be able to continue being bad actors if they lose their license, can’t get a new one, or wind up in jail.
Even better, let’s just have a national healthcare system.
Healthcare providers charge people without insurance the cost of an MRI machine for using the MRI machine tho. I wouldn’t rely on their benevolence.
Sure, but in this theoretical ideal world we wouldn’t have the problem of being without insurance either. That is, if we had universal Medicare instead of a for-profit insurance industry, then no one would be without insurance. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid services dictates what they’ll pay if you want to get reimbursement from them at all (unless you’re a pharmaceutical company, for some reason, then you can charge whatever you want), and the hospitals where MRI/CT/etc. machines are housed would all quickly crumble without any Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements (and actually would be better off financially if half their ER patients were not uninsured).
And if we can’t rely on their benevolence, then the licensing board or law enforcement would theoretically address any problems. Ideally, anyway.
Cigna has this cool new thing they do where, after they deny a medication for our son, they have a nurse call us and tell us why our doctor was wrong to prescribe it in the first place. You know, because a nurse who has never been in the same room as my son knows more than the fucking doctor who examined him.
I have Cigna. Did you catch the email they sent before the new year? In 2025 you need to centralize your prescriptions between either CVS or Walgreens (with exceptions for small pharmacies I didn’t look into). They didn’t even send a physical letter, just an email they hoped would be ignored or missed.
I’m sure there are so many people already getting surprise huge bills at the pharmacy in 2025. Luckily I saw the email and put all my prescriptions at a CVS all the way across town instead of the Walgreens two minutes away. Because that CVS has one of my prescriptions that Walgreens seems permanently out of. Absolute fucking bullshit.
Jesus Christ that’s horrible. Fucking manipulative pieces of shit
Police recovered bullets at the scene that read, "delay, deny, defend
Depose. Say it, DEPOSE.
I can understand this one instance being an editorial slip-up, but I’ve seen way too many news articles that reference the bullets while omitting that one particular word - depose.
It’s the word that scares the oligarchs the most. Which is all the more reason for us to repeat it, even if journalists won’t. DELAY, DENY, DEPOSE.
Dude, you got the words wrong too: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Mangione (See “Alleged Role …”.)
(EDIT: The parent comment now has the correct words!)
In your defense, the cops initially reported the words from the bullet casings incorrectly before later making a correction. And half the media has been confused about it ever since.
Good catch! Thank you, I fixed my comment.
Awesome!
What a sick gif…
Can’t go wrong with Hitchcock.
Well, you assholes voted in trump and the republican cabal so dont expect any change soon.
Remind me again when this shit started happening? Not like it was being prevented before Trump or Biden or Obama or Bush. Honestly I could go back pretty far. Nobody is stopping these companies from doing what they’re doing it’s not gonna change.
Fuck trump because we all know what’s gonna happen but in this specific situation nobody will do anything even if Biden or Harris were running the show.
Yeah, it’s hilarious. Most of the surgeons I work with voted for Trump…
Are any of them not assholes? Are any of them not rich? Every surgeon I’ve met is a rich asshole. Rich people voted trump, assholes voted trump.
Drive by doctors who would not be able to do that shit under single payer.
Proud to say as of the first of the year I’m no longer insured with these dirtbags.
I’m now insured with some other dirtbags.
Some dirt bags are slightly less bad than other dirtbags. That’s why I have Comcast Internet.
Who could possibly be worse than comcast.
Small regional providers. Ever heard of Wow! Internet? I assure you they are terrible.
Wow was cheap and fast for me… And would go down for 3 days at a time inexplicably. Oh, and they sent me a modem-router combo with cascade routers disabled and a firmware flash that prevented me from changing it, evnthough I specifically requested (and paid for) modem only.
In my experience Wow! is less scummy that Comcast, but also less reliable. Overall it is probably a wash.
Wow was the answer I was expecting too lol
Or Frontier
Cincinnati Bell was actually half decent.
cox communications.
Their name is literally pronounced “cocks”. It really says it all
Hughesnet.
It’s the inverse of “the grass is always greener”. The internet service is always shittier.
I’m curious as well. I haven’t met worse.
A complete lack of internet would be worse than Comcast, but it’s honestly a pretty close thing.
Can’t speak any the companies in the south or on the coasts but Comcast is easily one of the best residential Internet providers in the Midwest.
I’m not fan of Comcast but I dealt with pretty much every provider out there when I was an integrator (IT and AV for rich people) and it’s not even close.
Let that sink in…that’s how shitty the other ISPs are.
Sad to say, my company was bought by another, and i am forced to change to these dirt bags. I currently have a malady that will require surgery. Not that it matters, the old company declined my last surgery anyway and i paid out of pocket
Push back when it’s auto-declined. You can often get them to pay up even if they decline at first. They’re trying to make as much profit as possible, so they decline and hope you don’t fight back.
I mean thats the thing right? Except it’s not that easy. The billing man at the practice has been trying, and when i call i get the, “your claim has been reviewed by a human and denied.” Canned response. And i have to go through the call carousel. And now my job changed providers, so now i am trying to get back pay from a healthcare company i don’t have an active account with. But i really don’t want to have half my jaw amputated.
Yep. They make it has hard as legally possible. It’s bullshit. It’s all very fucked up.
