Losing Well Part 20

Continuation of my series, Losing Well. Part 1 can be found here.


December 2015

One of the first things my LTD insurance company did was to make me get a case worker at my State’s Division of the Blind. I’d done this over a decade before and I didn’t think they had anything new to tell me. DOB came out to check on me and determined that I already had the coping skills I needed. They retested me on my cane use and were satisfied I could get around on my own. They did suggest I try to get disabled transportation services from the city. When I’d last asked about disabled transportation in the previous decade I’d been told I couldn’t apply because of my employment. Something had changed.

So I went ahead and applied. My case worker told me that she’d never had an RP patient get approved for disabled transportation. So I did what I’d always done for work, I put together a Power Point presentation. It documented the intersections I had to cross, the distances I had to walk. The meeting went well and I was approved. Afterwards, I gave my Power Point deck to my case worker to help her other clients. 

The insurance company gave up trying to force me back into temp job at the bank and shifted their focus to getting me into retraining. I resisted this because it seemed like they were just trying to duck their fiduciary duty. They didn’t want to actually evaluate my claim before they booted me out the door. 

I don’t believe the insurance company was used to working with someone who wasn’t intimidated by them. They were used to people making claims bending over backwards to please them. Many of their requests didn’t seem legal. I simply  refused to give into them if I thought their requests were unreasonable. The first suck request was that they wanted access to all of my health information, not just my eye doctors.

After searching on the internet, I figured out that my insurance company was looking for inculpatory information. Not information I’d lied about but information they could use to try and deny my claim. They wanted to know if I’d had a physical or if I had a therapist. If they could prove my disability was all in my head then they would only have to pay me for two years not twenty.

My response to these requests was two fold - 1)what part of the contract you have with my employer allows you access to all of my medical records? Can you send that request to me in writing? 2)I have HIPPA rights and no, you can’t have those documents.

To be clear, I happily sent all of my eye doctor’s notes over to my insurance company for review. But I didn’t want to allow them to go on a fishing expedition through my medical history. They weren’t trust worthy. They didn’t have my best interests in mind. If I followed their process they’d find a way to drop me. I had to stand up for myself and demand they actually evaluate my medical claim. They eventually stopped asking for my medical records unrelated to RP. And they never did send those request in writing. But they didn’t give up that easily.

Part 21 can be found here.