EDINA, MINNESOTA — UnitedHealthcare, the insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group, decides which of a doctor's services convert into money. To do this, it keeps records about the doctor. One of its records listed an Edina physician as deceased. The physician kept seeing patients in the same office, at the same hours, in the same body. The discrepancy was discovered not by the insurer but by the money, which stopped moving.
Under the insurer's procedures, a provider recorded as dead stops generating payable claims. Payments that once flowed to the physician's bank — an institution licensed to store numbers — ceased. Restoration to active status is available, and the deceased may apply for it. The application requires the deceased to demonstrate continued life to the party that recorded its absence, using documents the deceased gathers, copies, and mails at the deceased's own expense. Requests for manual review join a waiting list, which is the queue of the queue.
The itemized account, as compiled by this desk, reads as follows: one administrative death, issued without charge; one resurrection, priced in hours the living must donate; telephone time, postage, and photocopies, billed to the deceased; the original error, carried on the insurer's column at zero. No line assigns a cost to the party that mistook a working primate for a concluded one.
"The file is never wrong," said Marla Voss, revenue-cycle supervisor at a Minneapolis clinic. "If the file says you are dead, you send proof of life. Nobody sends the file proof that it made a mistake. There is no form for that." Asked whether correcting the insurer's own records might appear on the insurer's own invoice, Dale Petersen, a senior manager of provider communications at UnitedHealthcare, said: "We take the accuracy of our directories seriously, and restorations are typically completed within standard processing timeframes." He did not say who pays for the postage.
The physician remains alive, and the Star Tribune, a local publication, has verified the pulse. Whether the records have since corrected themselves is not recorded. No fee appears on any form, because the fee never appears on forms; it appears in hours, in stamps, in the patience of a doctor with a waiting room. Assigning the costs of resurrection to the deceased is not, in the schedules, a cruelty. It is a pricing decision. The ledger, as usual, balances. The death was free. The living are what was billed.
