Caresse Jackman, InvestigateTV
After Susannah Reed-McCullough’s husband died in 2018, she and their younger daughters continued to obtain medical health insurance via his job as a firefighter in Maryland.
Then, in 2024, she acquired an surprising medical invoice: $377 for a checkup for certainly one of her youngsters the earlier fall. Reed-McCullough mentioned she referred to as the physician’s billing division and discovered the insurance coverage firm had dropped the kids’s protection.
The drop turned out to be a mistake. But Reed-McCullough mentioned she was pressured to behave because the go-between for her late husband’s human assets division and their insurer — all whereas apprehensive about her daughters’ being uninsured.
In this installment of InvestigateTV and KFF Health News’ “Costly 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 appropriate an issue they didn’t create.
Jackman interviewed Elisabeth Rosenthal, senior contributing editor at KFF Health News, who mentioned unintended protection drops are “a common problem” in want of consideration from state regulators.
“People make mistakes, systems make mistakes, and they should be held responsible for them, not the patient,” Rosenthal mentioned.
KFF Health News is a nationwide newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about well being points and is among the core working packages at KFF—an unbiased supply of well being coverage analysis, polling, and journalism. Learn extra about KFF.
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