A Life-or-Death Insurance Denial

生死攸关的保险拒赔

The Journal.

新闻

2025-05-15

21 分钟
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单集简介 ...

Billions of health insurance claims are processed every year, and around 19% of them are denied. Very few people appeal, but those that do have a chance at a different outcome. Jessica Mendoza speaks to one family about the insurance denial that threw them into a life-or-death crisis, and WSJ’s Julie Wernau on the system they navigated. Further Listening: - Even Doctors Are Frustrated With Health Insurance  - The Cyberattack That's Roiling Healthcare  Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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  • Ed Stratton is 65. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, not far from his daughter, Erin Stratton.

  • Are you guys close, you and your dad?

  • Oh, yes.

  • Can you tell us a little bit about him?

  • Yeah, absolutely.

  • He has always had the biggest personality.

  • really funny, very engaging.

  • He's been in sales his entire career, so he has that very charismatic salesperson personality.

  • He, both my family, my entire family, extended and everything is very big into golf.

  • Ed played golf all the time.

  • He loved being out on the sprawling course.

  • But in late 2023, he started feeling more and more run down.

  • He'd had other health problems in the past, and now it turned out that his liver was failing.

  • He would just get so sick.

  • He was in and out of the hospital.

  • He was really losing a ton of weight.

  • He was very tired, couldn't eat.

  • Ed's doctors gave him all kinds of treatments, until finally there wasn't much else to do.

  • It got to a point where there weren't a lot of options.

  • We had gone through what...