The Ongoing Battle with Insurance Carriers- and loss of doctos from Work Comp

There are people talking about the problem with loss of treating doctors in the Texas Work Comp system. I can predict that this will continue and be worse, as insurance carriers continue their tactics of denial, disputes, and stall tactics.

These tactics and practices have as their logical and practical conclusion and effect, the frustration of the best attempts of doctors to properly diagnose and manage the patient's problems.

If a doctor finds loss of strength in a lower extremity, numbness and/or hypoaesthesia, perhaps the beginnings of bowel and/or bladder problems, signficant, intractable, unrelenting pain in the low back, it is a concern for any experienced doctor that we may be dealing with a disc problem /space occupying lesion that may be encroaching on a nerve root and/or stenosis of the central canal, and the logical first step, is to obtain an MRI of the L-spine to rule this in or out.

But, you find that, all too often, when you request this procedure, it is denied by some low level functionary in the "utilization review" chain, and all the while, the patient is allowed to suffer and perhaps get worse, losing more function.

Injured workers , if they organize and band together, CAN have power and political impact, but they MUST get organized and act proactively, contacting their senators and representatives and demand that something is done to change the obstructionism of carriers.