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.”
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.