The cancer turned out to be more aggressive than was first surmised. Obviously, the insurance carrier was right to demand the aggressive, rather than "mild", chemotherapy.
It baffles me why people are OK with insurers dictating care to doctors rather than the other way around.
Remember the big flap about bone marrow transplants for advanced breast cancer? End result: a successful transplant meant you lived longer, but the risks of the transplant offset that, there was no survival advantage.
This is not to say that there are no improper denials. It's pretty obvious some companies use red tape, and I suspect some reviewers are either being held to unreasonable standards or being overworked, resulting in deliberately lost paperwork. (Remember the scandal with the VA dropping patient visits to make the numbers look better?)
And reading the article a few things stand out to me:
1) I can't find the name of the drug being denied.
2) She gives the stat that 49 million claims are denied but 0.2% were appealed--is that truly evidence of wrongdoing, or is it evidence of the insurance companies providing the no that doctors are afraid to give patients? And how many are entirely legitimate (my wife had a denial--right drug, right digits, wrong form, wrong dose. Clearly a human selected the wrong thing from a list)?
3) She talks about lives that would supposedly be saved by Medicare for All--never mind that that would collapse our system as there is considerable cost shifting from Medicare to those with commercial insurance.
Doctors are free to give any care they want.
Sorry guys but you are really living in a shithole country.
Because it's my money and I don't want it spent on low-success-rate snake-oil cures. I want that money to be available to me when I need it. Insurers have to diligently manage the pool of premiums to ensure the maximum number of people live, not just those who can write the best articles for magazines.
Milder chemo came and went. My body felt like it was filled with cement after infusions; my eyes could not stay open; but the hairs on my head grew longer, and there were no more boils in my throat making it impossible to swallow or speak.
I went into remission that fall, and set myself to moving beyond cancer while also beginning to process the changes it had wrought on my body, and the nearness of my brush with death.