As a matter of fact, you remind me that the busy pulmonology practice that treated my dad’s COPD employed a registered nurse whose full time job was to coordinate appeals to insurance companies.

She has become such an expert that I seldom had to finish a sentence with her. She already knew what the problem was as soon as I started speaking. She’d seen it all a million times already.

She went to bat for us twice with respect to denied medication. She succeeded in winning an appeal one time and did not succeed the other time.

I wonder how much good she could do if she could devote her sharp skills and intellect to patient care instead of bureaucracy?

I’ve written before about how the last couple years of my dad’s life were defined by struggles to access and afford medication. This despite the fact that he had Medicare and supplemental insurance.

I wish more people understood how broken our “system” is.