the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Jan 19, 2026
The Maryland state government has a small team who help patients’ dispute denials of service claims by health insurance companies. Every year they get insurers to pay back around one and a half million dollars for having denied several hundred people’s claims.
The stories are all outrageous. For example, a child was admitted to a hospital emergency department considered “in network” by the parents’ health insurance company, and then was transferred to the same hospital’s psychiatric unit—which was not considered “in network,” and the family had to pay more than $10,000 in bills.
Officials say the government unit receives 12,500 consumer complaints, hotline calls, and emails each year. It turns down most of them, around 10,000 each year. Of the rest, it handles around 500 appeals and grievance cases, with success in more than half.
Every year, health insurance companies in Maryland rake in at least hundreds of millions of dollars in profit, while denying at least several million claims. The work of even a small department of analysts can identify, but not fix, the system’s destructive functioning.