It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC.

Good morning again, everyone.

We're going to talk now about something that health insurance doesn't do more often than it used to not do it. I think that's

English. It's an experience that's becoming more and more common at the pharmacy counter.

According to a new report in the New York Times, private health insurers are denying claims

for prescription drugs at a higher rate now than they were a decade ago.

Maybe you saw the story that came out a few days ago and joining us with insights from her reporting is Sarah Cliff, investigative health care reporter for the New York Times.

Hi, Sarah. Welcome back to WNYC.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

For people who missed your article, and we'll open up the phones for people's personal experiences to help you report the story

further. But can you give us a quick recap of the big takeaways? Sure, and I'm sure we'll get

plenty of experiences because this is a pretty common experience in our health care system. The

big takeaways, we've worked with a large health data company, Komodo Health, to analyze about 4 billion health insurance claims

from private insurers over the past decade, which is often a black box. And what we saw was pretty

startling. We saw a jump in denials by private insurers of 25% between 2016 and 2023.

One thing I do want to say from the outset is some of these denials get resolved.

Not all of these claims mean someone doesn't go home with their prescription,

but they do indicate there is this growing friction in our health care system,

you know, between a drug getting prescribed by a doctor

and a patient receiving that drug.

Certain drugs, certain classifications of drugs.

Yeah, there's a few, you know, it was a little difficult to get that granular, you know,

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