Respecting A City’s Roots While Protecting Her Residents with Dana Buntrock from UC Berkeley

Physician advisors are becoming the quiet linchpin of hospital resilience in a reimbursement environment where insurers increasingly treat care like a spreadsheet exercise. As payers tighten criteria and automate denials, the gap between clinical reality and business logic widens—and without a skilled physician advisor (and a disciplined appeals pathway), health systems risk watching…

Payer denials used to feel like a series of personal affronts—clinicians and administrators trading war stories in hallways, certain they were being shortchanged but lacking the proof to do more than fume. Today, that fog should be lifting: with data warehouses, smarter analytics, and years of claims history, hospitals can pinpoint which payers…

Insurance denials have quietly become one of the most powerful forces shaping American healthcare, not through better outcomes but through a steady tightening of what insurers are willing to cover and when they’ll say so. The real scandal isn’t just that claims get rejected—it’s that the system rewards obstruction, pressuring hospitals to spend…

Healthcare in the U.S. often feels less like a covenant and more like a negotiation conducted on a tilted table, where insurers hold the rulebook and patients hold the receipt for their pain. The “two-midnight rule” and similar fixes were meant to tame arbitrary denials, yet the system keeps sprouting fresh loopholes because…