Doctors surprised at insurance listings

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article on how some doctors are surprised to be inaccurately listed as accepting certain insurance plans. The author of the article wrote, "Exchange officials blame the insurance industry, where inaccurate and out-of-date provider lists are nothing new." Interestingly, we've encountered something similar. We found a doctor listed on an insurance company's website, and we thought it odd since we hadn't heard of that insurer in this area. We proceeded to call the doctor's office and the person who answered the phone said that he hadn't heard of that insurance company. This can have implications for those who might be switching health plans: such patients might be sorely disappointed to find out that a doctor they were expecting to accept their new insurance doesn't actually accept it. While industry insiders might know about the long-running inaccuracies of insurance databases, the general public might not.

What's particularly interesting about that article is how even the doctors' specialty information was listed incorrectly -- to the extent that CoveredCalifornia removed such information from their website. Needless to say, looking for a new doctor is much harder without the specialty information. Hopefully, the databases that insurance companies have will become more accurate on both counts.

For those who are curious, we generally figure out which doctors accept which insurance plans by checking with the website of the medical group. We believe this is more accurate (the provider's office is largely the one that would have to handle patient outrage of being billed extra for their being "out-of-network" despite being told otherwise). However, the downside is that not all provider directories will list insurance information. We expect that the situation will improve over time, especially as more information becomes available online.