I had a friend of a friend be forced to take (and pay for! Thanks America!) A pregnancy test when she had to go to the ER, despite her telling them she physically couldn't get pregnant because she is trans, I swear in some cases it's like they just don't listen to patients at all 😭
This happens to me all the time. I got sick of paying for it so i started throwing a huge fit every time they start in on that pregnancy test bullshit. If i say "ive had a total hysterectomy" and they still insist that "maybe you just dont quite understand, we HAVE to make sure youre not pregnant" i just start saying "HYSTERECTOMY. HYSTERECTOMY. HYSTERECTOMY." over and over until they give up. I used to be super super nice to medical professionals, but after 10 straight years of them fucking up my meds and insurance both on purpose and on accident, wasting my fucking grocery money, denying me treatment, and (on one occasion) using a medical exam as an in to sexually assault me, i give them exactly ONE chance. Past that, they deal with the mean bitch version of me
Edit: oh my god the well actuallys are so annoying. Yeah, you can have a pregnancy without a uterus. Would it surprise you to learn that ive actually had a total hysto and bilateral salpingooophorectomy and i say that every time and i have proof and they still dont care? It's not about the technicalities, its about valuing liability above human dignity and above the fact that people need money to eat and cant be wasting it on hospital liability that has no bearing on reality
I let them know ONCE and then let them do it anyway and then report them for insurance fraud :)
I havent had to pay for a single one of those tests. I also do not communicate to the medical facility that I am reporting them for insurance fraud. I let my insurance company know that they have done a test they knew they shouldn't do and I also report them to the proper local authority.
I’m curious, does anything ever come of that? Do you hear back about how it’s handled?
This is tangentially how I got a tubal ligation and how I advise others who have struggled to access the same surgery. I called about a dozen doctors and told them what I was looking for. Gave them my demographics. Explained I’d been turned down before after attending initial appointments/exams due to info I’d provided upfront (like my age). Asked that they verify that the doc was willing to perform the surgery with that provided info, because if I was turned down I would report it to the insurance company as fraudulent. Made sure to be super polite while explaining. It took a bunch of calls but I finally found one and got my surgery.
Ironically, getting a hysterectomy was much easier though I chalk that up to getting a genuinely good doctor.
I dont often hear back from the authorities or the insurance company, but I check my online itemized bill with some regularity and I notice that charges suddenly disappear from it. I also do sometimes call my insurance company directly for an update if I am particularly ticked off or if it seems to take too long.
At the point that I am satisfied (fraudulent things removed), the bill is paid. Ive only had a bill go to collections once and I asked the collections agent if they knew that the bill was part of a fraud investigation and havent heard a peep since.
I dont blame you for using the same method, threats of reporting for fraud are surprisingly effective. They do not have a high tolerance for being investigated, especially because it can open them up to having other records looked into.
Because it might mislead someone into signing up until the misguided belief that they will be the exception too, when the far more likely outcome is that they will be as royally screwed over as the vast majority of UHC customers.
Doctors will straight up put procedures in their notes that never occured, you get charged, and the doctor makes more money. I'm currently in the middle of fighting upcoding in the hospital that I work at because we keep getting complaints of people being charged for things that never happened.
Due to having a special account to pay for medical care from, I document in detail all payments towards medical care.
I paid, lets say, $1,400 for account at hospital over this year. I got a bill saying that I still owed them $700 and had already paid $700. And the running total of the page documented $1,000 owed.
I called, pissed, rattled off all the info from the receipts I retained and asked them to justify the additional expense. They tried to say "oh its from stuff from before" but they couldn't be specific, and the transaction history did not display that (the transaction history showed 3 different procedures/visits, that had a total of $1,000 in cost). They could not explain why they did not retain the $1,400 or who had it, or why they would be "from another department" (and why that would use the same account number, if different bills/accounts/departments). I told them, listen, y'all, if I took you to court with the bill you sent me and all the receipts, you'd be ordered to refund me that $400 difference. So lets skip it and you send me a check already. They said they'd send me an itemized bill.
That was over a month ago. Silence since then. I've got a lawyer because I recently had to sue an ex-employer, I think I'll throw her $100 to send them a threat over the $400. If they don't pay, I will take them to small claims court for $500 ($400 for bill overpayment, +$100 for legal expenses+filing fees)
Honestly the only way they’ll ever change is if enough people fight back. Most people don’t want to deal with the hassle or be perceived as a “Karen” type. My wife and I routinely go to one another appointments to advocate for one another and it’s drastically improved our outcomes.
While being a polite Karen (insisting, forcing my way up the chain of command, getting shit done when noone wanted me to succeed), a state representative once called me "a significant disruption." while they were being forced to fire 3 prominent public-facing employees over time fraud, documentation fraud regarding who physically had an at-risk nonverbal special needs child in state custody, and racism respectively. Gave me such a rush I almost got it tattood on my chest. It was my job to advocate for the mom of that special needs child at the time. :)
And yes my wife and I go to eachothers appointments. Thankfully we found a doctor who doesn't try to mess with us now.
I still daydream about that tattoo but I'm too worried about autoimmune reactions and pain/fear of needles lol (I hate someone else needling me, I can stick myself for medication and IVs).
I have MCAS, so as soon as I heard that tattoo ink can travel into the lymphatic system I got concerned.
I'm thinking about doing something little as a test spot first. Ya know like a little brown freckle-sized heart on my ankle or wrist, or something pretty inconspicuous.
I finally have a good doctor and I will sing his praises till the day I die. It's amazing because after the upfront investment of going through my history with me, he rarely needs to see me for more than a few minutes because we have great communication and he has fixed many of my issues. Being a good doctor took effort in the short term but has rewarded him with free time in the long term, as well as a very compliant patient who will be fully honest and who refers literally everyone to him.
My first few visits with my good doctor were quite long, because I had a huge gap in my medical history due to doctors refusing to send me to the correct specialist, so I stopped bothering, because they'd be like "I can't help with that but you're not unwell enough to see a specialist, lose weight fatty."
I got to see the specialists I needed, and I'm losing weight thanks to hormone correction (I literally could not lose weight before, I'm eating more than ever but still losing weight now that the hormones are being managed).
One of my favorite books, Snow Crash, (which yes, is rather pulpy but-in a self-aware way, it's great) contains the following passage:
This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for. The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before, outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow Crash card to Da5id.
The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.
Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air as Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns launch into their opening number, "Radiation Burn." It is a tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily through a wall of fishhooks.
These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of people who have a high potential of going onto hurt others, a warning tattoo on a prominent body part.
POOR IMPULSE CONTROL
Apparently, this guy went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.
And your anecdote made me imagine you with a similar tattoo, but worn as a badge of honor.
The most charitable take would still be 'anti-hero', at best. There's some defensible motivations behind a lot of their actions, but they're overall pretty rotten, sorry to say. It's a foundational work in the cyberpunk genre if that's something you're into, though.
I’m curious, does anything ever come of that? Do you hear back about how it’s handled?
Health insurance companies take FWA (fraud, waste, and abuse) VERY seriously. Think of all the posts on reddit about denied claims/authorizations...you think they want to pay healthcare providers for fraudulent services?
This is why i specifically notify my insurance company, rather than the facility. They clean things up the fastest. They basically foam at the mouth when it is a repeat offender.
SO - doctors actually are totally legally within their rights to deny elective surgeries due to their own personal feelings about it. It's not insurance fraud. The other major hurdle with sterilization surgery is even if you find a doctor that's game, there are lots of hospitals (usually religiously affiliated ones with "saint" in the name) that have their own restrictions on sterilization happening at the hospital that overrules even an agreeing doc.
I had a tubal done too, and I found my amazing doc via the r/childfree subreddit where users have compiled a list of doctors and leave reviews. Was able to save myself a lot of legwork and find someone relatively quickly thanks to that sub for my own tubal!
It’s not fraud for a doctor to turn you down for a surgery for a legitimate reason. Like doing the pre-op testing and finding that you’re anemic would be reasonable.
However, if you call an office and provide your age and number of children up front only to attend an appointment and be declined due to your age and/or number of children, that’s 100% fraud. If they have a criteria you must meet to be eligible and know you are not but book your appointment anyways, they’re doing so for the sole purpose of taking you or your insurances money. I’ve absolutely reported offices for doing this and gone through the investigation process and gotten my bills dismissed.
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u/mysocksareinsideout MakeshiftEmery Jul 31 '26
I had a friend of a friend be forced to take (and pay for! Thanks America!) A pregnancy test when she had to go to the ER, despite her telling them she physically couldn't get pregnant because she is trans, I swear in some cases it's like they just don't listen to patients at all 😭