The Insurance Warrior takes on a $61B Company

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

When Mattew Lientz needed surgery to save his life, his insurance wouldn’t cover it. Enter: Laurie Todd, the Insurance Warrior. Her first task: Figuring out who Matthew was really fighting, and how big the battle really was.

Together, Matthew, his wife Diane, and Laurie made the case for Matthew’s life. Fourteen years later, the speeches they gave in a conference room full of insurance executives are a masterclass in winning insurance appeals — and living to tell the tale.

The battle also illustrates a lesson that Laurie Todd learned while fighting it: Fighting your health insurance often means fighting... your employer. Yep, most employers “self-insure.”

And in this case, that employer was one of the biggest companies in the world.

Here’s a transcript of the episode.

For the Insurance Warrior's origin story, check out our previous episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. Matthew Lentz was an engineer at Boeing for decades, and not the stereotype
0:05.7	engineers are anything, but he's not super demonstrative. Like, when I asked him to tell me
0:10.4	the story of how he almost died, this is how he begins.
0:14.3	When my merry go round started, I was 56 and I'm 72 now.
0:18.7	Oh, yeah, it was pretty crazy.
0:20.7	That's Matt's wife Diana. Matt will tell you, he would never have survived the merry go
0:24.8	round without her. Well, let him get the story going.
0:27.2	I worked for Boeing for over 34 years, and one day I had a pain in my lower right side.
0:33.9	A pal of his had his appendix burst, a real mess. Matt wanted to avoid that, but committed
0:39.4	Boeing employee, it's not like he was going to clock out early.
0:42.6	I sat there all day doing my job and I took the bus home and I decided I was going to go
0:48.1	to the doctor.
0:49.1	A few hours later, he's in the hospital getting his appendix out. It was messy, what they
0:53.9	call perforated. Matt spent a couple days in intensive care, recovering, and then he
0:59.3	gets a visit from the surgeon.
1:00.7	He asked for everybody else to leave the room, except for Diana. And he says, I'm so sorry.
1:06.7	I'm so sorry. I'm just sorry. And I looked at him for what? I said, did you leave a tool
1:12.6	in there or something? You know, you forgot to take it out. I mean, cancer was the last
1:16.8	thing in my mind, but there was Matthew was back in surgery next day, getting a third of
1:22.2	his colon removed. Then there was chemo, two flavors. The second one left Matt with neuropathy,
1:27.8	nerve damage. 15 years later, he still can't feel the bottom of his feet, except when they
1:32.6	tingle or when the lower half of his body feels like it's on fire. But at least the doctor
	...

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