May 2023

Editor’s Note: The Amish Cook is being written this week by Dorcas Raber, Gloria’s mom. Gloria will return next week! It was “the day before“, the day before the wedding of my niece Rhoda.

You are probably familiar with drug commercials. There are all sorts of them showing people being active and smiling as they attend a birthday party, go biking, go surfing, or shopping at a flower shop. At some point they start listing some of the side effects and precautions, including some obvious and some scary statements.

Millions of Americans in the past few years have run into this experience: filing a health care insurance claim that once might have been paid immediately but instead is just as quickly denied. If the experience and the insurer’s explanation often seem arbitrary and absurd, that might be because companies appear increasingly likely to employ computer algorithms or people with little relevant experience to issue rapid-fire denials of claims — sometimes bundles at a time — without reviewing the patient’s medical chart. A job title at one company was “denial nurse.”