How to Fight a Health Insurance Denial With a Little-Known Tool (from ProPublica’s "Paper Trail")

And that's when they started to get really worried because, you know, he called the doctor and said like, look, I'm not getting better.

In fact, I'm getting worse.

And he meets with a psychiatrist and he tells him, my heart is racing, like my legs feel weak and I'm waking up at 2.30 in the morning and

And he was having these really terrible nightmares.

And so then, you know, the doctor asks him about whether or not he's considering ending his life.

And he tells him he felt anxious and hopeless, but he was too scared to die.

Dua spoke to Teresa and her husband several times about what happened next.

The details you're about to hear are difficult and do a thought long and hard about whether to publish them.

So did our team.

But the details are important because this is the situation that doctors from the health insurance company were evaluating to decide whether the treatment was medically necessary.

So two days

after he met with his psychiatrist, he goes into the garage and he swallows a bottle of sleeping pills, chases them down with some bourbon.

And then he sat in the car, in the garage with the car running.

And he closes his eyes.

And he thinks that's going to be the end.

Teresa calls 911 because she was trying to get a hold of him.

I went over immediately, called the ambulance.

The paramedics arrive and they take him to the hospital.

And he was involuntarily committed at that time to like a county level facility near us.

I must assume that when he starts needing this care, you know, I don't know that probably coverage was the first and foremost concern.

The first and foremost concern was, I'm going to go get some help.

Yeah,

he had great coverage.

He had Highmark, Blue Cross Blue Shield, you know, like really good private insurance.

And so I think that they had just assumed that we've been paying into this and we've been paying our premiums.