Flouting Consumer Law, Insurers Refuse to Pay Medical Bills for Emergency Care

Over the past two years, Flight for Life has airlifted car crash victims, premature babies and adults struggling to breathe to hospitals across southeastern Wisconsin.

Anthem, the major health insurer, covered dozens of those patients, but it has refused to pay $2.1 million it owes the company for their helicopter rides.

The amounts due for each emergency medical flight range from $9,382 to $62,373. Anthem has historically paid its bills, but late last year it suddenly stopped.

“It was like a faucet they just shut off,” said Flight for Life’s executive director, Leif Erickson.

The insurer’s willful nonpayment is the latest in a cascade of unintended consequences brought about by a widely supported law that was intended to protect patients from surprise medical bills.

The law, which took effect in 2022, calls for arbitrators to decide appropriate levels of reimbursement, and it has already triggered millions of disputes between medical care providers and insurers. Doctors have prevailed overwhelmingly, winning arbitration settlements that sometimes far exceeded the usual insurer rates.