Back in February, my wife had a procedure that she has been getting every six months for several years for her autoimmune illness denied by the insurance I got from the job I started in November. I had to spend three months on the phone with them, file multiple appeals, and a complaint with the state because their responses to the appeals were somehow verbatim copies of the original denial saying basically "it's not on the list of pre-approved conditions". They claimed after the first time the letters had come from third party doctors they sent the case to review, yet somehow none of them seemed to think it was worth addressing the letter we sent them about a dozen times that she would be at risk of organ damage and death without the treatment.

Every time I called they claimed that there was a completely different process that I should have done the previous time and that they had no record of me being told otherwise. After they got notice of the complaint with the state (over two months in), they finally assigned someone directly the case who I could call rather than waiting for an hour on hold to get someone who would invent new processes that they claimed I didn't follow. She insisted that none of the other processes I was told were correct and that if my wife's doctor filed out this one proper form and faxed it over, the appeal would get handled correctly. Her doctor faxed it over literally the next day, and around a week later we got a letter in the mail (the only way they'd ever send us denials, despite us being opted into "100% paperless" on their site and claiming that they never received the initial letter from the doctor that they insisted he snail mail) that was once again identical to the same ones we had always gotten. I got upset at the person they had assigned to the case because they insisted that this was the proper way to appeal and accused to the company of fraudulently claiming that a doctor had properly reviewed the case because I could not believe any competent doctor would have nothing to say about the whole "patient will die of organ failure" thing. They agreed to let her doctor talk directly to one of their doctors on the phone, and lo and behold, two days later, we hear from the infusion service company that they heard from the insurance company that it's finally been approved (around three full months since the date of the initial appeal).

So the short answer is...yes, and there's absolutely nothing most of us can do same it

> You guys live like that for real?

"live" is doing a lot of work there.