How Often Do Health Insurers Say No to Patients? No One Knows. ( www.propublica.org )

Insurers’ denial rates — a critical measure of how reliably they pay for customers’ care — remain mostly secret to the public. Federal and state regulators have done little to change that.

[…]how often insurance companies say no is a closely held secret. There’s nowhere that a consumer or an employer can go to look up all insurers’ denial rates — let alone whether a particular company is likely to decline to pay for procedures or drugs that its plans appear to cover.

The national group for state insurance commissioners gathers a more detailed, reliable trove of information. Yet, even though commissioners’ primary duty is to protect consumers, they withhold nearly all of these details from the public. ProPublica requested the data from every state’s insurance department, but none provided it.

Two states collect their own information on denials and make it public, but their data covers only a tiny subset of health plans serving a small number of people.