The mother of an Arizona man who died after being unable to find mental health treatment is suing his health insurer, saying it broke the law by publishing false information that misled its customers.
Ravi Coutinho, a 36-year-old entrepreneur, bought insurance from Ambetter, the most popular plan on HealthCare.gov, because it seemed to offer plenty of mental health and addiction treatment options near his home in Phoenix. But after struggling for months in early 2023 to find in-network care covered by his plan, he wasn’t able to find a therapist. In May 2023, after 21 calls with the insurer without getting the treatment he sought, he was found dead in his apartment. His death was ruled an accident, likely due to complications from excessive drinking.
Coutinho was the subject of a September 2024 investigation by ProPublica that showed how he was trapped in what’s commonly known as a “ghost network.” Many of the mental health providers that Ambetter listed as accepting its insurance were not actually able to see him. ProPublica’s investigation also revealed how customer service representatives and care managers repeatedly failed to connect Coutinho to the care he needed after he and his mother asked for help. The story was part of a yearlong series, “America’s Mental Barrier,” that investigated the ways insurers employed practices that interfered with their customers’ ability to access mental health care.
shareholders and board members in corporations that do this nonsense need to be criminally charged and given appropriate sentences. corps want “rights” like humans and shareholders want corps to put profit first? then they can all be treated like the motherfucking criminals they are.
yes. i mean ALL shareholders. all it’ll take is once and the whole system will change when grandma goes to jail because her 401k has stock in this criminal entity.
I’d be fine with the compromise that your sentence should be proportional to your level of stake in the company. So, grandma’s .00001 shares would get her community service, while the 51% holder gets life.
completely agree.
Look, either Grandma is contributing waaaaayyyyyyy too much to her 401k, or Grandma’s portfolio is tied up in a bunch of small shitty companies or it’s all in one slightly less small shitty company. Whatever it is, if Grandma’s monthly contributions are enough to have a controlling vote in a company, she needs a new financial advisor.
haha true. but when I send money to hamas, I’m “supporting terrorists.”
but grandma allows her money to be sent to a corp that chooses to kill people and … she’s just little ole grandma?
pfft. :p
Why are you sending your money to Hamas? That’s a bad retirement plan, too. You’re supposed to stuff all your money into your mattress.
That’s why you spend the first 20 years of your career buying various mattresses, so that you’ll have enough storage for when you retire as a billionaire. And when the government wants you to pay for taxes, you just send them a mattress.
haha i am of course not sending money to hamas lol. it’s just to prove a point in the thread.
I agree. But I wonder: if the law isn’t able or willing to help, what recourse is there? What is to be done?
protest and running for office?
Free Luigi!
He did his bit. One luigi per ceo, not one luigi for all the ceos
I don’t care how many Luigis it takes, as long as we get all of the CEOs, and free all of the Luigis.
Mine isn’t as bad as that, but I went through a dozen listings before I found an up to date one. The information is so old sometimes. One place I called said that doctor had not even been there for two years. Just lazy people
It’s not a bug. it’s a feature. Because if you don’t get the care you need, they don’t have to pay! 😡
“Navigating the Healthcare system” is code for: Good luck suckers!!!
lazy. on. purpose.
Most insurance plans don’t cover mental health beyond trivial interactions for a trivial period of time. Most metal healh professionals don’t accept insurance because they can’t afford to. After a decade between school and “volunteering”, insurance companies offer a wage that could easily be made with far less stress, responsibility, and accountability. Earnings can be “clawed back” by an insurane company at any time.
Most insurance companies don’t provide out of network benefits, because they can make more profit by exploiting customers and labor. Often pitting them against each other to avoid any responsibility.
MHPAEA is a fucking joke. For profit healthcare should be illegal.
Don’t forget, there is basically no oversight on therapists, so if your therapist tells you you should quit your job to “submit” to your husband, then disappears after a week or so of torture, meaning that you navigate a divorce with zero access to domestic violence supports, your life is over and there is no consequences!
There is a lot of oversight on therapists, every state has a regulatory board. We have to go through thousands of client hours before getting our license, which can get revoked if we do anything illegal or unethical. Maybe you’re thinking of life coaches?
Not in the south.
What state doesn’t have a regulatory board?
Regulatory boards can exist but only choose to meet a few times a year, refuse to investigate anything that happens to a certain class of people, and also just not want to do their jobs because social services and regulatory agencies are like weekend clubs here.
Things are not working to the point I am trying to whistleblow a decades long “industrially scamming the free school lunch funds” and no one gives a shit. No one gives a shit about anything, Jesus Christ it’s Oklahoma. There are no consequences for anything here.
Seems like this is a state by state issue. I didn’t have this issue on Medicaid or paid for insurance (not marketplace).
