Prior Auth in the News – Is Anything Going to Change?
Despite renewed promises, prior authorization burdens are growing. Use our free patient flyers to raise awareness, push back, and keep real reform in focus, because this issue isn’t going away.
Links for today:
Patient Ready Prior Auth Flyer (print and use)
UHC Medicare Advantage Prior Auth Flyer
More patient fliers
More on UHC Medicare Advantage Prior Auth Requirement
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Transcript:
Prior authorization is back in the news again, and insurance companies are making promises again. A lot of this and some of you may reflect back on 2018, when insurance companies got together with several key large lobbying groups in the healthcare industry and made promises that they were going to reduce administrative burdens, and they were going to reduce the number of prior authorizations. Well, seven years later, what we’re really seeing is something exactly the opposite. We’re seeing additional burdens. We’re seeing more prior authorization requirements. And it’s, it’s, again, huge. In fact, it’s so big that HHS actually changed requirements for Medicare Advantage plans and prior authorizations, and those requirements begin on January 1 of 2026 and again in 2027, and so some of these things are already coming. So here’s what’s really interesting is some of the promises that these insurers are now making really are reflective of the requirements of them that are going to be already in place by the time that some of these promises that they’re making are going to be in effect.
In other words, they’re already going to be required to do these things. That’s important to know. The second thing is, guess what? Prior authorization, even with these promises, even with what we’re hearing in the news over the last couple of weeks, it’s not going anywhere. We’re still going to have prior authorization. And here’s the thing, and this is really important to know and remember, we have to involve the patients in this process. The ICS and other key groups, such as Chiropractic Future, have already begun the process to empower you to be able to inform your patients better about these types of things. Most specifically, is prior authorization, because it’s back in the news. We need to make sure that we continue to keep it there. We need to keep our patients engaged. We need to keep the pressure on. And in order to do this, we have to have your help to engage the patients. And so what we’ve done is equipped you with some flyers that you can implement in your practice. One is specifically United Healthcare and Medicare Advantage. We’ll include that link down below, and another one that is more general for prior authorizations for all insurers. And so that one is, is more general it it gives you the information, explains to the patient why this negatively impacts their care and negatively impacts your ability to help them return to health, and also then gives them who they can contact, who they can reach out to, and the talking points that they can utilize in those discussions to impact care. But the important thing is that we engage the patients; to engage the decision makers in this process, we have to keep the pressure on.
We’ll include the links down below to those flyers. Please get on. Use those flyers. Print them out in your practices, hand them to your patients. They don’t cost you anything. And so Medicare Advantage flyer number one is for United Healthcare specifically, and the second one is for all other prior authorization patients. Let’s keep the pressure on. Let’s keep this in the news. Let’s keep reform in place, and let’s make sure that there’s actually true reform and insurance companies actually do impact and change the way that they’re negatively impacting our patients’ return to health. We’ll catch you next week.
