A general view outside the United Healthcare corporate headquarters on Dec. 4, 2024, in Minnetonka, Minnesota. A surgeon from Austin, Texas, has slammed the company for allegedly interrupting a patient's surgery to question their insurance claim. (Stephen Maturen | Getty Images)Getty Images
A surgeon in Austin, Texas, was left speechless after she says a UnitedHealthcare representative interrupted her patient’s surgery to question if their overnight hospital stay was “justified.”
Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a board-certified plastic surgeon, was performing reconstructive surgery on a breast cancer survivor when she allegedly received a phone call from the insurance giant.
After being told the call was urgent, Potter says, she scrubbed out of the procedure and contacted the company.
“The gentleman said he needed some information about her; he wanted to know her diagnosis and whether her inpatient stay should be justified,” she said in a video uploaded to TikTok.
“I was like, ‘Do you understand that she’s asleep right now and she has breast cancer?' And the gentleman said, ‘I don’t actually. That’s a different department that would know that information.‘”
It’s 2025, and navigating insurance has somehow gotten even more out of control… I just performed two bilateral DIEP flap surgeries and two bilateral tissue expander surgeries. During one of the DIEP cases, I was interrupted by a call from United Healthcare—while the patient was already asleep on the operating table. They demanded information about her diagnosis and inpatient stay justification. I had to scrub out mid-surgery to call United, only to find that the person on the line didn’t even have access to the patient’s full medical information, despite the procedure already being pre-approved. It’s beyond frustrating and, frankly, unacceptable. Patients and providers deserve better than this. We should be focused on care, not bureaucracy. I just have no other words at this point
In a follow-up video, Potter clarified that she didn’t leave the patient alone in the operating room, and that another surgeon was present — but that she felt compelled to answer because of a “fear-based system.”
“If an insurance company calls me and says I gotta call them right back, I’m afraid they’re not gonna pay for my patient’s surgery, and that patient’s going to be stuck with the bill,” she said. “It’s a crazy world we’re living in right now.”
A representative for UnitedHealthcare told the Daily Mail that they would never ask a physician to step away during an operation:
“We did not ask nor would ever expect a physician to interrupt patient care to answer a call and we will be following up with the provider and hospital to understand why these unorthodox actions were taken.”
The company has not, however, publicly explained why they questioned the patient’s hospital stay in the first place.
After Potter’s video went viral — with over 4.7 million views and counting — she says UnitedHealthcare has personally reached out to her.
“As a doctor, it is next to impossible for me to reach out and talk to someone at an insurance company,” she said on TikTok. “But after posting that video, United actually reached out to my office and left their number.”
Following the December assassination of its CEO, UnitedHealthcare has faced extreme scrutiny over its pattern of denying medical claims.
One lawsuit, filed in November 2023, claims that the company illegally denied elderly patients care “by deploying an AI model known by the company to have a 90% error rate,” reports CBS News.
Multiple other families say United repeatedly denied requests for a wheelchair for their sick and disabled children.
The publicly-traded company is the largest health insurance conglomerate in the nation.
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