Marcela Villa isn’t a big name in health care — but she played a crucial role in the lives of thousands of Medicaid patients in California. Her official title: denial nurse.
Each week, dozens of requests for treatment landed on her desk after preliminary rejections. Her job, with the assistance of a part-time medical director, was to conclusively determine whether the care — from doctor visits to cancer treatment — should be covered under the nation’s health insurance program for low-income Americans.
She was drowning in requests, she said, and felt pressed to uphold most of the denials she saw. “If it was a high-dollar case, they tried to deny it,” Villa said. “I told them you can’t deny it just because it’s going to cost $20,000.”
[For more on this story by Chad Terhune, go to https://khn.org/news/coverage-...te-companies-profit/]
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