Is There Anything I Can Do To Stop Healthcare.gov From Listing Fraudulent Insurance Companies?

I love healthcare.gov, but I just started getting angry again thinking about the horrors I experienced from a certain healthcare company, Molina, when I made the mistake of picking badly one year. It was a terrible, horrible year for me.

I had picked them because they offered therapy and psychiatric care for depression, which I needed, and they were $70 cheaper than any other silver plan. I called Molina first to talk over their mental health benefits, and went over everything, and they assured me there were tons of providers, I could go to therapy, and the anti-depressants I needed were in network. My depression had been getting bad, and they even assured me that I could do an in-treatment program, mostly covered if I needed.

How things ended up: I don’t think they ever even paid for my psychiatrist, I had to get my previous one to file a ton of “preauthorizations” for a very standard and commonly used antidepressant, and they had to knock my dose down first because I had to do several months of the same dose before they would approve the higher one. For a very standard medication.

Therapy and finding a psychiatrist was a disaster. They gave me a 12 page sheet of over 100 therapy “providers.” Many were numbers that hadn’t been in service for 5-10 years, Pediatric Primary Care Doctors offices that never did therapy, that kind of thing, with the same place being listed over and over again under tons of different numbers (like the billing department of a place, then the office itself, the customer service department.) When I got through that list and there was nothing, I called dozens of times to see what to do and they sent me a 100 page list of every therapy “provider” in the county. I got to page 25 after 2 days of calling with no luck, and called and told them there was no one on there. I called dozens of times again, and finally someone told me I could file an appeal to have someone find me a provider, but it would take one month. When I called again many times over the next two months, finally they gave me a phone number to a provider… who wouldn’t accept new clients, and didn’t accept any adults with ADD (which I have), and required that I see a doctor there, although I don’t even know if the doctors there were covered, and none were accepting new patients either.

Once I had a UTI, and went to the doctor. The doctor I had found in network demanded I run a blood test because of the anti-depressants (which was odd since I’d never had to do that before) and said she had no idea if my insurance would cover, but it was a matter of health so I needed to do it. And she wanted a urine sample to be run for the UTI. I said I needed to call my insurance company, and they said the lab that doctor office worked with was not in network. So I went home to try to figure out how to get these labs run. It took days, as no one could tell me what labs were in network, and the numbers they gave me didn’t work. Luckily my UTI subsided. The insurance company said I would need to find a doctor office that would let me take the samples and drive it several hours to the lab. I doubt any doctor’s office would allow that, and I can’t drive on the highway, so I gave up.

I literally begged the insurance company to help me find a therapist and psychiatrist, and told them I was in a really really bad place, and I was concerned I could become depressed enough to hurt myself if I didn’t get care soon, and that would cost them much more. They clearly didn’t care.

Now I’m with a different health insurance company for two years about, Priority Health. I have therapy appointments as often as I want with a provider close by, they pay for my newer brand name expensive anti-depressants, and I don’t even worry about calling to see if Labs are covered anymore (they always are.) As a result of all of the treatment, etc, I am in a great place mentally and physically, and I don’t think I even cost Priority Health too much as I don’t even need therapy much anymore, and I can get treatment for anything right away so it doesn’t spiral. I still want to get Molina shut down. Is there anything I can do about this? What they did, they surely do to everyone. I don’t want anyone else to have to pick between all of their savings and their health. I could have gotten a kidney infected and died from just the waiting to find out about labs. So angry just thinking about it again after letting another user know to pick a big healthcare company and not a tiny one like Molina.