The Journal. - Even Doctors Are Frustrated With Health Insurance

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

The killing of a top health insurance executive outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel this month triggered an outpouring of public anger at private health insurance companies. WSJ’s Julie Wernau reports that many doctors are among the aggrieved. And two doctors explain how dealing with health insurers is getting worse. Further Listening: - The Suspect in the UnitedHealth Killing  Further Reading: - Doctors Say Dealing With Health Insurers Is Only Getting Worse  - Clues Left by a Killer Echo Widespread Anger at Health Insurers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our colleague Julie Wernau covers health and medicine. And for the last few weeks, she's been writing about the United Healthcare CEO, who was shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan earlier this month. This is something that really seems to have struck a chord with almost everyone. It is this singular moment where literally everyone is talking about the same thing. The killings sparked a broader conversation about the role of insurance companies in the healthcare industry. That conversation has found its way into Julie's inbox.

She's been getting a ton of emails, many of them from people who are frustrated with their insurance companies. And one thing Julie's been surprised by was how many emails she's received from doctors. Can you just walk us through some of them and like maybe quote a couple? Let me pull up my very crowded inbox.

Just give me one second. Okay, here's one that says medical insurers are out of control, regulators are worthless. She read me several of them. Leaves countless patients and doctors outraged. The brazen techniques of UnitedHealthcare, which deny and delay approval and payment. That this is insurer misbehavior at its worst.

And it's good to know people are becoming aware of the dangers of over-prioritizing profit over people. Doctors the journal spoke with made it clear they disavow the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO. Still, broadly speaking, doctors had two main complaints. One, patients are being denied treatment. And two, doctors are having to fight with insurance companies to get paid.

It's something doctors have to deal with every day. And they say both issues are getting worse. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Knudson. It's Thursday, December 19th. Coming up on the show, why doctors are fed up with insurance. in your hand when you're behind the wheel. Distracted driving is what's really scary and even deadly. Eyes forward, don't drive distracted. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. How complicated would you say the insurance industry is? Incredibly complicated. As anybody who has tried to understand it knows, this is a Byzantine world that only a select few number of people really understand, and it is even, you know, confounding to doctors.

How did insurers come to play this role in our healthcare system? I mean, ultimately, I think that, you know, the system was set up for a society that truly believes in, you know, that the cheapest, best way to run things is through a marketplace, right, and checks and balances. I mean, this is the way this was set up originally. I mean, the insurer in some ways is the check and balance of the system so that doctors can't sort of run amok and, you know, rack up a lot of medical expenses that are unnecessary, tests that are unnecessary just to get themselves paid.

Still, many doctors say the system isn't working. They're seeing more and more insurance companies denying the care they prescribe. From a non-clinical standpoint, that's the worst part of my job. That's Dr. Alan Nguyen, a spine specialist in Fort Myers, Florida. It makes my blood boil. It makes me live it,

that someone else is dictating care for my patients when they have never laid hands on my patients. They've never seen my patient or interviewed them or questioned them to see the severity of their situation. How much time do you spend dealing with insurers? I have to put out maybe 30 minutes to an hour or so, three times a week. I work in a very large office,

so we have a prior authorization department that sends in most of the information when the insurance requests it. But I have previously worked in offices where the doctor does not have a lot of resources and can't hire all the staff to do that. So they end up doing the majority of it and the paperwork becomes very time consuming.

So how often does care that you're recommending get denied by an insurance company? A couple of times a week. And it's becoming more frequent. In Alan's case, he often has to lobby insurance companies to approve treatment before he can implement it — a process called pre-authorization. If it doesn't get approved, he can't do it unless the patient pays out of pocket. One procedure that he says gets denied a lot has to do with patients dealing with a spinal fracture.

There's a procedure I can do to fix that fracture. It's called a kyphoplasty. I put some bone cement in there and for the right patient they're up and walking with 95% pain relief right after the procedure. They come in a wheelchair and they come out, they walk out of there, you know, smiling and walking just fine. And sometimes insurance companies won't authorize that procedure. What reason do insurance companies typically give for the denial? Is it... They say that the most common reasons would be that

the patient doesn't need it, for instance, or it doesn't help, or it's experimental, or you didn't provide documentation to show that the patient has already tried X, Y, and Z before doing the injection. Health insurers say denying certain treatments is an important way for the entire health care industry to keep costs down. Sometimes there are a number of cheaper options available

to a patient that they should be trying first before they skip right to a really expensive test, for instance, like an MRI, or even after the MRI, that they continue in physical therapy before they get surgery. There's a step-wise process that health insurers use to try to keep costs down. I asked Alan about this.

What do you say to the insurance companies that say that, they're just trying to keep prices down and that physical therapy is a good and cheaper and less invasive option that ought to be tried first? I completely agree with them. I'm not trigger happy. I don't like to inject patients with needles and medications.

If they can get better naturally, that's what I would prefer. That's what I would want for myself. I've had injections before. If I had gotten better with just therapy, I would have preferred that. It's always an option I offer. But sometimes they're in so much pain,

they can't do physical therapy. I've tried to prescribe it, but I can't force a patient to do physical therapy. Julie says this is an experience she's heard from a range of doctors. They say these denials can discourage many patients from getting the treatments they need. They say that what happens is that patients who might really need treatment sort of now

end up either waiting for treatment, or sometimes the delay to get that treatment means that the patient's condition worsens or that they actually lose that patient. So, one doctor I talked to had someone who was, they really needed an MRI that day, but because they were waiting for the pre-approval process, they had to send that patient home, wait 10 days,

then her son had to try to get time off to bring her back for the MRI treatment. Often it's in that gap that patients just disappear. Sometimes before an insurance company will approve a claim, they require something called a peer-to-peer review. What that's supposed to mean is that your doctor is matched up with a doctor inside the health insurance company to review your case and determine whether or not that care is needed. The idea is that it's an actual doctor at the insurance company who helps make the decision.

The process usually requires the doctor submitting the claim to build a case for why an insurance company should approve and pay for the treatment. Now some of these doctors are frustrated because the peer that they might be matched up with might not be someone who is in their specialty at all. So you might have, you know, an oncologist who's trying to have a peer-to-peer review with someone who's, you know, a family doctor

or general practitioner, for instance. Allen has had mixed experiences with the peer-to-peer process. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, because sometimes it doesn't matter what you tell them. I can show them all the studies that they requested to back up the procedure. And they might still say, oh, our company's guidelines, my employer's guidelines,

say that it's experimental and we cannot authorize it. But if you're a doctor speaking to another doctor trying to do what's best for the patient, you shouldn't let the company dictate what treatment the patient gets. I mean how do you feel about the fact that like part of your job is doing that? You can't just make a decision that you also have to then go and justify it with an insurance company? I think it's complete bull crap. Because the middlemen, the insurance companies, undermine the physician-patient relationship.

These are things we didn't learn about in medical school. We were taught that we should always do what's best for the patient. And we don't have a choice here because we get compensated by the insurance company. When an insurer denies a treatment, there is an appeals process, though doctors say it can be cumbersome. AHIP, the health insurance trade organization, says the U.S. health system is, quote, fragmented

and heavily regulated. It added that health insurance companies are, quote, working to protect patients from the full impact of rising costs while connecting them to care that is safe, evidence-based, and coordinated. A lot of other doctors, we've learned, feel similarly to you. A lot of other doctors have written into the Wall Street Journal about this issue. Does that surprise you?

Not at all. Um, not at all. Because doctors complain about this stuff pretty often. We have Facebook groups where they post these kinds of stories all the time. But they're Facebook groups. They're private Facebook groups where you have to be a vetted physician to join. The public doesn't see it. I think these complaints should be more public.

Coming up, how tussling with insurance companies can affect a doctor's business. Dr. Keith Berger is a gastroenterologist in Virginia. Keith runs a private practice, which means he's his own boss. Medicine runs in a family. And so Keith says private practice made a lot of sense for him. I could practice it the way my dad, my grandfather, my son and my brother doctors, his son's a doctor, my daughter is a doctor.

We understand medicine. We get terrific ratings from our patients, but we may not be making the big bucks, and we are not making the big bucks in our practice, but we are treating people really the way they want to be treated or better. So how would you say that your relationship with insurance companies affects your practice financially?

Well, last year I lost money for the first time ever, ever, in 43 years of practice. Keith says there's a variety of reasons he lost money last year, including higher expenses and fewer patients. But he says that insurance delays and denials are part of it. So imagine you've got maybe tens of thousands of dollars at stake and you don't know are you ever going to get it paid,, are you ever gonna get it paid? How are you gonna get it paid? It's just aggravating to be working

in that kind of environment where there, every day it seems like a breakdown of some kind of issue and you're gonna have to handle it and you have to go through this very elaborate process. It's aggravating. It's like a thorn in your side. For Keith's staff, that thorn is also very time consuming. So when my staff are tied up doing, you know, fixing mistakes that insurance companies made or arguing with insurance companies about why they should pay for a colonoscopy or a CAT scan,

you know, that sucks. First of all, it's really very discouraging, because we work hard at being good at what we do, and we hate to tell a patient, well, sorry, your insurance company isn't going to cover this when they should. So it's demoralizing from that standpoint. And like I said, my office manager, I only have one. I pay her very well.

But how many jobs can she do? And she's got to go through a hundred charts that were underpaid by one of those insurance companies. So, just imagine, I don't know, it's like sitting at a table of a poker game, knowing that it's rigged. How long do you want to play? How long do you want to play? Have you thought about selling your practice? I have. I got so dejected about this,

my wife said to me, she said, honey, you got to make up your mind or you go understand you can't, you got to stop complaining about this. I have some very good friends I've known for years in different GI practices. I looked at what they were doing. They were all bought out by private equity.

For now though, Keith is staying independent. I used to tell people all the time coming out of medical school and residency, oh, you should go into private practice, be independent. It's great. You create the practice that fits you instead of kind of get in the corporate stress environment. Now I wouldn't advise anybody to do it.

Insurance companies, of course, aren't solely to blame for the problems doctors are facing. Pharmaceutical companies, of course, aren't solely to blame for the problems doctors are facing. Pharmaceutical companies, government regulators, and large hospital conglomerates also contribute to some of the same issues patients and doctors are frustrated with. Health insurance companies have said that they play a really important role in the health care system, that they're all trying to do the right thing here, that some of these complaints that come from patients and doctors are unjustified. There's a lot of really important reasons that claims get denied. Often it's because, you know, there's not enough work being done to back up the claims

that are being sent. You know, they lack information that would help them make a determination that would allow them to support a claim. Are you surprised by what you heard from doctors? What do you make of the fact that so many are angry? I think I actually, you know, I cover healthcare. I don't think I had, I don't think I realized how angry doctors were at health insurers. You know, I thought that they sort of understood that system more than I do as a patient or even as a reporter.

And to get these letters one after the other saying, you know, we're just as angry as everyone else you're seeing on the internet, and we don't understand it either, and this entire industry is a total black box, and it's taking away our will to continue to be doctors. That was really troubling to me as someone who knows that this industry desperately needs more doctors. So after talking to so many doctors about the state of the insurance industry in the U.S., what's your takeaway? My takeaway is that if the health insurance industry is working, it is unclear to Americans what it's supposed to be doing, why it makes the decisions it does.

It's just become so complicated that people don't understand why they're getting charged what they're being charged, why they're being denied what they're being denied. And I think any attempt by the health insurance companies to pull back that curtain a little bit and let the public understand why these decisions are being made and how would really change the future of this industry. That's all for today.

Thursday, December 19th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode by Josh Chaffin and Anna Wildy Matthews. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.