Plastic surgeon won't bill insurance

Surgeons work for money, not just for the fun of it.  So suppose your job pays $10.00 an hour and your boss tells you that this week insurance will pay your salary and you will be working for $2.00 an hour. 

Would you accept that or would you tell your boss that you want the full $10.00 even if she has to pay out of pocket?

What the heck are you talking about?  Perhaps you should pose this question to the insurance company and not to me. I pay for a service in this case insurance. I expect when I have a claim that it should be paid.

You are 100% right.  The claim would be paid, but the doctor might refuse to do the work because he wants the full amount for his service, not just what the insurance pays. 

More and more doctors are refusing to accept insurance, they find patients who are financially able to pay them and refuse the others.

Well said. Plastic surgery is a business. To stay in business, you have to make money.

HERE is my surgeon's take on insurance and his advice. (if the link does not work, go to www.drlomonaco.com and click on patient resources)

Thanks for the info. I did check out the information most of it I already knew. Please don't think I woke up yesterday morning and thought I should risk death and lay on an operating table because I want to be a Victoria secret model.  I definitely fall into the category of functional impairment. My attempt to receive surgery is not solely needed to improve my physical appearance. I wear two body shapers daily due to the massive amount of skin in my midsection. I have worked out 5-7 days a week for the past 10 months. I am much stronger than when I started my journey but there are still movements I can't perform due to the the excess skin.  

I understand business. I also understand I have paid for medical insurance for the past 30 years and the first time I tapped into it was last year for my VSG.  

I don't mean this to sound snarky, because it truly isn't meant to, but how can you have so much extra skin that it impairs movement when you "only" lost under 90 pounds?  Do you still have a lot of weight to lose?  Excess skin alone weighs very little, and doesn't generally impair movement.  Even after losing 190 pounds, and having a panni that hung down onto my thighs, I had to wear industrial strength shape wear, but even without the shape wear it didn't impair my mobility or ability to exercise.

It occurs to me that what you categorize as "massive" extra skin (and therefore believe your insurance will cover removal of) might not look like extra skin to the surgeon's office and they therefore don't believe that your insurance will cover it even if they do allow procedures that almost every other insurance doesn't.

Lora

Sounds snarky to me luckily my ability to live isn't predicated by what you think. At any rate you don't know me or my body so don't tell me my mobility isn't impaired or that my pannus doesn't qualify for surgery.  

I didn't TELL you anything.  I ASKED about it (if I knew you and your body, I wouldn't have needed to ask!) and I offered a potential reason for the response you got from the surgeon's office (which would then give you another potential way to approach them in order to try to get them to pursue insurance approval).

This is really useful!