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The Journal.

A Life-or-Death Insurance Denial

The Journal.

The Wall Street Journal

Daily News, Business News, News

4.25.3K Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Billions of health insurance claims are processed every year, and around 19% of them are denied. Very few people appeal, but those that do have a chance at a different outcome. Jessica Mendoza speaks to one family about the insurance denial that threw them into a life-or-death crisis, and WSJ’s Julie Wernau on the system they navigated. Further Listening: - Even Doctors Are Frustrated With Health Insurance  - The Cyberattack That's Roiling Healthcare  Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Ed Stratton is 65.

0:07.9

He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, not far from his daughter, Aaron Stratton.

0:12.6

Are you guys close?

0:13.3

You and your dad?

0:14.5

Oh, yes.

0:17.4

Can you tell us a little bit about him?

0:19.8

Yeah, absolutely. He has always had the biggest personality. He's really funny, very engaging.

0:28.2

He's been in sales his entire career, so he has that very charismatic salesperson personality.

0:36.9

He, both my family, my entire family extended and everything is very

0:41.3

big into golf. Ed played golf all the time. He loved being out on the sprawling course.

0:49.4

But in late 2023, he started feeling more and more run down.

0:54.4

He'd had other health problems in the past, and now it turned out that his liver was failing.

1:00.4

He would just get so sick.

1:01.8

He was in and out of the hospital.

1:04.3

He was really losing a ton of weight.

1:06.5

He was very tired, couldn't eat.

1:09.5

Ed's doctors gave him all kinds of treatments, until finally there wasn't much else to do.

1:15.1

It got to a point where there weren't a lot of options.

1:19.6

We had gone through what would traditionally be the remedy for the issue that he's having in his liver.

1:27.8

And so it got to this point of like,

1:30.4

if you get a new liver in his case, all of the problems go away.

1:35.6

His doctors said the best solution would be a liver transplant.

...

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