My wife is a clinical psychologist who used to take insurance. She got tired of not being paid for months for patients she saw. Legally they have 90 days to pay you, but in practice it’s closer to 4-5 months. Every January they claim to have “computer problems related to the new year” and simply lose huge numbers of claims, requiring you to resubmit — oh that claim is more than 90 days old even though it was their system that “lost” it? Sorry, can’t submit! Guess you just worked for free!<p>She takes cash now. It was an abusive system and I’m not surprised it’s falling apart.
In my experience, this isn't anything special about therapists.<p>Going through the listings for <i>any</i> kind of doctor in your health plan is a nightmare. When I needed to see a <i>primary care physician</i>, it took two hours of calling 10+ listed offices to find one that was <i>actually</i> a primary care physician, was still practicing in the geographic area, was accepting new patients, and still accepted my health insurance (apparently dropping plans is common?). And the earliest they could see me was in 6 weeks.<p>It was the exact same type of experience when I needed to see a particular type of specialist, except the earliest appointment I could find was in 3 months.<p>The insurance companies just don't update their lists for <i>any</i> type of doctor, as far as I can tell. Whether this is due to sheer incompetence or deliberate deception or some combination of the two, I couldn't tell you.
Why do I get the impression that the economy in 2023 is based on primarily fake things? So many things are either illusions, legal grifts, and outright ripoffs. This isn't anything new per se, but I think we may have gone beyond a critical threshold. Will the chickens come home to roost, or have things become so simulated that too many people believe ambiguously in the system for it to fail?
I wouldn't necessary blame the insurance. My primary care doc gave me 10 referrals to psychiatric nurse practitioners but zero were taking new patients. I asked someone who'd written review articles on my condition to do the same and he said he would but I think he did some looking and came up short and ghosted me.
This is true of every provider list of every insurance company I’ve ever used.
It’s laughable bad.<p>“That doctor hasn’t been at this office in ten years”
“Not taking new patients”
I hate the health insurance system in the USA so much. It's just horrendously bad. I had a kid enter this world at right about the same time I changed jobs. That resulted in changing health insurance. On paper, this should have been a little expensive but fine because I paid extra money for Cobra to extend my coverage until the new plan kicked in. But it was such a mess.<p>I was making phonecalls and sending emails and logging in to weird web portals with two different insurance companies, Cobra (which was managed by some mysterious other entity??), two different HR departments, and the finance people at the hospital for months trying to deal with this stuff. The hospital we were at was in-network for both insurance companies, but no one was communicating with each other (and apparently one doctor involved was not in-network, so there were extra charges, which is such bullshit).<p>Why is my employer involved with my healthcare costs anyway? It's genuinely a Kafka-esque nightmare.<p>Anyway, any presidential or congressional candidate that opposes universal healthcare doesn't get my vote, ever. Sorry Biden, but you don't automatically get my vote just because I disagree with the republican platform.
Even better, they refuse to remove therapists who no longer take insurance even after multiple attempts and letters requesting removal. It's a fun scam.
It’s unlikely this is as interesting as the headline suggests.<p>Maintaining a list of professionals is challenging. There are very simple input problems with this kind of data.<p>The professional, in this case a therapist, but it really doesn’t matter what they do, just isn’t going to keep their portal updated on the insurance network aggregator.<p>The insurance companies can’t make the anyone update their listing, and the professionals don’t have incentives. They’re full up on work so there’s no real need for them to do anything to get clients.<p>This is a bog-standard supply and demand problem.