Just before lunchtime yesterday, Shannon gave me a ring and asked me what the worst thing I could imagine happening right now would be. My heart immediately started racing and I started thinking that she had gotten a call back about the genetic testing or that Alex was somehow no longer eligible for CIs or something equally bad, but I asked her to just tell me what was up.

Our ENT called her and stated that our health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, had not only denied Alex’s June surgery pre-authorization (where the ENT / surgeon makes sure that health insurance is on board with a procedure before it happens), but had also stated that if we attempted to appeal it and lost that Alex wouldn’t be able to undergo the procedure until a year after the failed appeal.

I calmed down a bit from there because that information sounded completely odd. I’ve worked in health insurance before and even though I wasn’t processing claims, I worked closely with the people who do, and I’d never heard of that sort of punishment for failing an appeal. Shannon and I both believed that what was actually meant was that if we lost an appeal, that Alex wouldn’t be able to get his implants until HE turned one year old, which would make much more sense.

At the end of the phone call it was decided that I would call BCBS to get confirmation that our suspicions were correct about the one year figure and that Shannon would call our very helpful audiologist to get her take on the process and basically let her know that we’d be going for an appeal that she would likely end up contributing to.

It took me about a half hour to get my answers, but after getting off of the phone with BCBS, I had learned two important things.

1. That Shannon and I were right about the one year thing, and
2. That the pre-authorization was never formally denied.

Figuring out number one was the most important piece at this point, because it was basically expected that we’d have to appeal but not that there would be an awful punishment in place should that appeal fail.

Number two was also key to know because without a formal denial, there can’t be a formal appeal. I called our ENT and asked to set an appointment up with our doctor surgeon so that we could discuss the process of the appeal, ask him how these things generally know, etc. The nurse / administrator I was on the phone with was obviously trying to lean us away from that direction, which I was alright with as long as things kept moving. The most important thing at this point was to CONTINUE the pre-authorization that the ENT had stopped after BCBS called and said it likely wouldn’t be cleared. Before they called Shannon, they were getting ready to cancel Alex’s surgery date! Once they file the pre-auth, we’ll get the rejection which will list whatever objections the health insurance company has, and then an appeal gets sent back refuting that reasoning or demonstrating the medical necessity / benefit of doing something contrary to those reasons.

That’s all well and good, but we’re only about six weeks away from Alex’s scheduled surgery at this point, so this is going to require some crazy amounts of pushing.

We plan on talking to our audiologist who has put some of these appeals together before and see if she can draft a personal recommendation for Alex. I’m going to collect a list of all of the research from Google Scholar that covers the benefits of early implantation. We’re also going to ask our physical therapist if she can write something up formally about what she’s told us, which is that deaf children sometimes don’t develop physically quite as fast as their hearing peers because they can’t take advantage of auditory stimulus to, say, attract their attention in another direction or entice them to roll over. The ENT will also likely write something up about the low-risk of the operation itself.

Apparently the appeal process can take up to a month, but our hope is that given our surgery date and how common performing this procedure early is combined with our plans to call daily and ask for updates, that we can get this done in time… but it’ll be tight, and it’s going to require our ENT to be on top of things (we’re going to call them daily as well).

Shannon and I came up with this plan over another phone call about 45 minutes after she had first called me.  I hung up the phone, and then got another call. The ENT office again. They said that based on the MRI showing a bit of fluid in Alex’s middle ear and the results of a tympanogram test we had asked to be done, that they wanted Alex to see another ENT and have his ears drained since they have to be clear for the surgery. I immediately got on the phone with the ENT they pointed us to and asked to be put on the priority call list after explaining the situation, especially since they needed to do a consultation meeting first prior to a procedure, if it was deemed necessary. Again, we have six weeks for what’s probably going to be an ear tube procedure.

So the heat is on and the pressure is up, but we’re going to do everything that we can to get this done and get Alex his surgery in June. He’s ready, the benefits are obvious, and it would be a travesty if he lost a few months of hearing time because of red tape. The good news is that even if Alex had to wait for a year to get implanted, the results are still very favorable, but there’s really no advantage in waiting aside from the prospect of a better CI coming along in that time frame. The healthcare pushback is also a common thing, so it’s not as if we’re seeing something wild and crazy. I’d feel a lot better if we had another three or four weeks, but we’ll deal with it. It seems that booking time in the OR for these surgeries can be tough to schedule, so if we lose our June date, I’m not sure how far back that would push us, so it’s go time. Time to REALLY start going to bat for our boy.