I don’t want to paint every insurance company as some big meanie ogre that wants to do everything they can to screw you over, but some times their actions are so ridiculous, you have to wonder if they are really run by robots instead of humans.
I thought of this recently when I got a call from a really nice truck driver who has never filed a work injury claim in his life. He’s been hurt a bunch, but never injured to the point where he needed more than Advil or a couple of doctor’s visits.
But recently he was unloading his truck and his back popped. He experienced a pain unlike any other that he had felt before. Worse yet, he was hundreds of miles from home in St. Louis so he had to check in to a strange hospital in a town he doesn’t know with no friends or family around. He had tried to drive through the pain, but it was so intense that he was worried he’d crash the truck and kill someone. So basically he did the right thing for his health and the right thing for his employer.
As he lay in the hospital bed, the doctor he saw told him that he needed immediate surgery as the nerves in his back were really compressed. Nothing else would relieve his pain or give him a chance for a normal recovery. This was on a Sunday and surgery was scheduled for Monday. He called the workers’ compensation insurance company that morning for surgery approval. He didn’t need to do this, but didn’t want to create any problems. What the adjuster said next just floored me.
She told him that before he had surgery, she wanted him to find his way to Chicago so that he could see one of their hand picked doctors to determine if surgery was needed. Uhm, what part of laying in the hospital bed didn’t she understand. It was the most insensitive and ridiculous request I’ve ever heard of.
The insurance company does have a right to request that you see a doctor, but can’t stop you from getting emergency treatment. But of course they didn’t care about that. They wanted this guy to get out of the hospital bed and somehow get to Chicago to see some doctor. Certainly they were asking him to travel so far because the doctor they chose is a hired gun. If they really wanted an honest evaluation, they could have paid to have some St. Louis doctor go see him. But they weren’t about what makes sense or what is moral.
The bad news was this request delayed his surgery by a day. The good news is that he did get the surgery and does appear to be on the road to recovery. That recovery could have been screwed up by a delay, but fortunately was not.
In the big picture, this just shows that insurance companies are businesses and their main focus is usually their bottom line and nothing else. If there was collateral damage from this delay, that would not have concerned them if they saved some money. It sounds harsh, but it’s the truth and as an injured worker you need to be cautious and really look out for yourself. Because I promise you that the insurance company is not.
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