This is what Dr. Steinberg's diagnosis about mine, "Your MRA scan shows bilateral supraclinoid internal carotid artery occlusion, with moyamoya vessels bilaterally. Your right P2 posterior cerebral artery appears to be occluded as well. "
but the problem is, my family physician called us yesterday and told us that Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO rejected our request to go Stanford>
for the following reason:
they belive that there are enough neurosurgeons in Chicago area who has MM experience and perform the surgery.
If I don't trust Dr. Munoz at Rush Hospital (the first specialist they referred me to see....information can be found from my previous posts), they now give me second choice.....Dr. Charbel at University of IL, and he can arrange surgery for me as early as next week....
my god, goes back to my question at the begining of this posts......who the hell is this Dr. Charbel?
Eventhough Dr. Charbel's staff refused to give me any number on how many MMD patients they've been treated, all of a sudden now, the HMO said that Dr. Charbel claimed that he's been treated 30~40 MMD each year for the past 10 years. "he's doing MMD by-pass surgery every other week, this is nothing new to him.......blah...blah..."
I really doubt in Chicago area there are 30~40 new MMD patients and they all went to see HIM???300~400 patients total? how come I didn't see any of his patient with good outcome said anything about his wonderful job on anywhere?
The otherthing made me very upset is that according to our family physician, Dr. Charbel told HMO director that "his is a good friend of Dr. Steinberg, and they share some MMD knowledge......" Does friendship with a specilist make you a specilist by defult???? what kind of logic it is!
I don't know if his so called good friend relationsip with Dr. Steinberg is true, but I don't believe this has anything to do with his profeesional performance. On the otherhand, somehow I believe a real good doctor doesn't need to brag his relationship with so-and-so to make people trust him more.
Our feeling is that our family physician will not fight for us with HMO. She even suggested us not to appeal. But my husband and I still want to appeal, at least we have to try. But we have no idea about the appealing process. At this point, we are collecting all the documents we have, and all the log files that I've been saving for each MMD related conversation with multiple "specialists".
Eventhough Theresa from Stanford told me on 05/03 that someone from the registration office will contact me, and collect my insurance information so that they can try to convince BCBS HMO, but so far, all most two weeks passed, still nobody called me.
I followed up twice via email and phone regarding to this issue, but they keep telling me that they are very busy, short handed, but keep promising that someone will call me.........I felt guilty of bothering them too much, so I didn't call last week. Now HMO has already rejected my request, and Stanford didn't even contact HMO yet, is it too late for Stanford to contact them??
What can I do now??? any suggestion is highly appreciated.