After Susannah Reed-McCullough’s husband died in 2018, she and their younger daughters continued to obtain medical health insurance by way of his job as a firefighter in Maryland.
Then, in 2024, she bought an sudden medical invoice: $377 for a checkup for one in every of her kids the earlier fall. Reed-McCullough stated she known as the physician’s billing division and realized the insurance coverage firm had dropped the kids’s protection.
The drop turned out to be a mistake. However Reed-McCullough stated she was compelled to behave because the go-between for her late husband’s human sources division and their insurer — all whereas fearful about her daughters’ being uninsured.
On this installment of InvestigateTV and KFF Well being Information’ “Expensive Care” sequence, Caresse Jackman, InvestigateTV’s nationwide shopper investigative reporter, explores how administrative errors can depart sufferers on the hook for medical payments they shouldn’t owe, generally with few choices to right an issue they didn’t create.
Jackman interviewed Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at KFF Well being Information, who stated unintended protection drops are “a standard downside” in want of consideration from state regulators.
“Individuals make errors, methods make errors, and they need to be held answerable for them, not the affected person,” Rosenthal stated.
KFF Well being Information is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about well being points and is without doubt one of the core working packages at KFF—an unbiased supply of well being coverage analysis, polling, and journalism. Study extra about KFF.
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