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Authorities are still looking for the person who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York Wednesday. But this next story is not about the murder. It's about how that news has prompted people to share stories on social media about terrible experiences with health insurers. NPR's Selena Simmons-Duffin has more.
SELENA SIMMONS-DUFFIN, BYLINE: Yolonda Wilson is one of the patients who shared a health-insurance-gone-wrong story on social media this week.
YOLONDA WILSON: My surgery was denied about two days before it was scheduled to happen.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Wilson has a UnitedHealthcare insurance plan through her job. She's a professor of health care ethics at Saint Louis University of Missouri. She's sharing this as a personal story. It all happened back in January. She'd been preapproved for a surgery, she says. Then suddenly, she gets this denial. The next day, she went to the hospital for what should have been her pre-op appointment.
WILSON: I showed up in the billing office and said, hey. I've just gotten this denial. What do I do? And they told me that I could pay cash. And I thought, well, that's not a thing that's going to happen in 48 hours.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Her surgeon got involved. They were both filing appeals to try to get everything ironed out. Her mom had flown in from Georgia to help her with recovery, and her partner had taken off work, and everything was in limbo.
WILSON: I did not know until Wednesday afternoon whether I would be able to have surgery Thursday morning.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She did get the surgery approved, and it happened as scheduled, and everything went OK, but only after a lot of unnecessary stress, she says. UnitedHealthcare did not respond to a request for comment about Wilson's story by air time. After she shared this story on X on Wednesday, it got a lot of responses. People were sharing their own stories of denials. One person said his mom's scan to check on her Stage 4 lung cancer was recently denied.
WILSON: A lot of people are in deep pain and maybe didn't have anywhere to put that pain.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: To be clear, the investigation into who killed CEO Brian Thompson and why is ongoing. Yolonda Wilson says she's not celebrating that a man was killed, although certainly some people on social media were. She calls that a dark impulse that might stem from people's unresolved feelings of hurt and helplessness.
WILSON: Health care is deeply personal. We don't often have ways to kind of talk about our frustrations. And so I think that this became that moment. Like, something was struck in this moment.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Health policy research going back decades shows the American health care system is uniquely maddening to deal with. Pam Herd is a professor of social policy at the University of Michigan who studies administrative burdens.
PAM HERD: It's one thing to be frustrated at the DMV because you have a ton of paperwork to fill out or you have to spend an hour in line. It's a whole nother thing to face those barriers when they are the difference between whether or not you're going to get lifesaving care.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Herd's research shows how barriers in the health care system can affect people's actual health, whether it's having to call several times just to get a doctor's appointment or trying to find an in-network specialist or fighting to get a procedure covered.
HERD: It's not just about the time and people lacking time. It's also these sort of other psychological costs that people experience in those encounters - stress, fear, frustration, anxiety.
SIMMONS-DUFFIN: She says dealing with health insurance is part of what overwhelms people. But, really, it's the whole system that's problematic for many.
Selena Simmons-Duffin, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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