Dade County Schools

Can anyone give me any information on Dade County Schools Insurance. A friend of our family is a teacher for Dade County and she says the school district is requiring 12 months diet history. Has anyone else had this experience? She said Cleveland Cllinic is her only choice for surgeons. Please reply if anyone can tell me how to help my friend.

I'm not familiar with Dade counties insurance. I looked into Palm Beach Counties insurance (my wife is a teacher) and they have an exclusion for WLS. Anyway, I believe that all insurance companies that do cover WLS require some type of diet history. Usually this is just something that documents that the weight problem is not something new and other measures to loose the weight have been tried and failed. Basically the insurance company wants to make sure that WLS is not the first option. I am pretty sure that this is a minimum requirement for most surgeons to even recommend a person for surgery. In most cases, diet history is just a list of all of the diets that have been tried over the years (dates, diet type, weight lost, weight gained back, etc.). Supporting documentation (doctors notes, nutritionist notes, diet journal, etc.) is helpful to include, but is most often not required. What your friend needs to find out is if the insurance requires a "medically supervised" diet. This is a diet that has been done in the last 12 months and lasted 3 to 6 months (depending on requirements). This diet usually has fairly strick guidelines that must be followed in order to be considered. Many people do the medically supervised diet in the months leading up to the surgery, as many surgeons want their patients to try to loose a few pounds ahead of time anyway.

I have just gotten my own surgery approval and I had to have my own diet history of 6 months consecutive visits and that I understand. I thought 12 months was a lot of diet history to require. We have the same insurer and she seems to think its a district requirement in their policy and not the requirment of the insurance company. I was hoping someone that is a dade county school teacher may have gone through the approval process that could shed some light.