Insurance Titan Drops Doctors, Needy Patients 'Caught in the Middle'
BAYONNE, N.J. — For five years, Rasha Salama has taken her two children to Dr. Inas Wassef, a pediatrician a few blocks from her home in this blue-collar town across the bay from New York City.
Salama likes the doctor because Wassef speaks her native language — Arabic — and has office hours at convenient times for children.
"She knows my kids, answers the phone, is open on Saturdays and is everything for me," she said.
But UnitedHealthcare is dropping Wassef — and hundreds of other doctors in its central and northern New Jersey Medicaid physician network. The move is forcing thousands of low-income patients such as Salama to forsake longtime physicians.
Across the nation, business and contractual disputes are separating patients from longtime doctors. This often occurs when doctors don't want to accept the rates insurers are willing to pay. It sometimes occurs when insurers' business plans require having a narrower network of doctors — doctors whose practice patterns may be easier to control.
But in this case, the cause of the exclusion goes to even deeper business connections: Wassef and other doctors say the insurer appears to be trying to shift patients to Riverside Medical Group, a 20-office physicians' practice owned by Optum, a sister company of UnitedHealthcare, both of which are subsidiaries of UnitedHealth Group. UnitedHealthcare is essentially forcing patients to transfer to doctors it controls, the doctors allege.
Indeed, several patients said the health plan directed them to Riverside when informing them their doctors were being dropped. "Once you have a trusted relationship with a provider, it means a lot and it goes to the quality [of your care] because if you are seeing the same providers and you trust them, you are more likely to take your medication and adhere to whatever care plan you have," she said.
Dr. Alexander Salerno, an internist who runs a 17-doctor multispecialty practice in East Orange, New Jersey, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, is helping lead the court fight. Salerno's main office is in a three-story, 19th-century house that his father used for his medical practice in the 1960s. About 40% of his patients are on Medicaid.
Until the dispute began last year, Salerno advised his patients to sign up for UnitedHealthcare because of its broad array of benefits, including vision and dental care, and because of the ease in referring to specialists. And UnitedHealthcare never complained about this group's skill. In fact, the group received a $130,000 bonus last year for its good care to patients. Salerno said Riverside Medical offered to buy his group practice in 2018, but he declined.
Since UnitedHealthcare announced it would drop his group from the network, more than 500 of his practices' patients have already changed doctors to stay with the UnitedHealthcare plan, Salerno said.
Velylia McIver, 83, decided in November to search for another plan so she could stay with Salerno. But it took her more than a month to get coverage for some medications.
Velylia McIver switched to a new Medicaid health plan after Salerno was initially dropped by UnitedHealthcare in order to keep seeing him "I feel caught in the middle of all this, and it's the pits," McIver said."It's not a bad insurance company. It just seems like they have become greedy trying to control both ends of the pendulum — wanting to be the payer and provider," Salerno said.
A federal judge ordered the case to be heard by a neutral arbitrator, which in late November granted an emergency injunction that will keep Salerno from being removed from UnitedHealthcare's network until an arbitrator makes a decision on a permanent injunction, which is expected in March.
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