Damn insurance companies

Those of you that have been reading this blog for a while know that I have a hate/hate relationship with health insurance companies. Well, now they've gone and pissed me off again. Rebecca spent days doing research to try and find a surgeon that might be able to help me with my chronic pain. She finally found one. We got the referral from our doctor. I talked to the surgeon's office, and he decided to send me in for a new CT scan, mostly to see if there had been any change since my last one (which could indicate something very serious.) All was well and good, since they'd already acknowledged that they take our insurance, but when his office called to try to get the CT scan approved, the insurance company informed them that there are two different types of insurance that this company has...the most common one, which the surgeon is in-network for, and the less common one, for which he is out-of-network. I'm sure you can guess which insurance we have...
So, the only way I can get into see this guy is to prove that there's no one in-network who would be capable of doing the surgery...which of course is interesting, since we hadn't even talked about an actual surgery yet. We just wanted to see what kinds of options I might have. So, now it's back to the drawing board as we try to find a surgeon who performs this operation (whatever that operation might be), who accepts our particular insurance, and who works with adults, since the majority of cardio-thoracic surgeons that deal with these kinds of issues work with kids. This will be interesting.
Now, thanks to another screw over by the insurance companies, I have to be in continuing pain, which is getting worse, especially as I'm having to work harder and harder each day at the "real" job. For example, I didn't get much sleep last night because I was so nauseous that I thought I was going to throw up, and it's not because I'm sick, it's just because I'm in so much pain.
So, I would again say that government needs to do something useful (like that ever happens) and reign in the insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical companies, instead of letting these companies set policy for the government.