Tad Rockwell, an HAE patient advocate, shares why building a trusted healthcare team and finding doctors who fight alongside you can make navigating insurance and treatment challenges easier.
Transcript
When you are dealing with insurance companies that do not want to pay for expensive medications or treatments, you have to have an advocate. And it’s not just you. You need to develop a team that’s around you.
And for me, that team starts with a doctor I choose to manage my rare disease. And — a long, long time ago — I think the biggest thing that I learned is really I will trade up and continue to trade up talent in my doctors until I find somebody who fights as hard as I do.
And so today I work with a doctor and a team, and when I change insurance, I have no doubt that they are going to the nth degree to get my prior authorizations, to rewrite the prescription, to fight on my behalf. “Right?”
And I’m always prepared to step in whenever they need me to work with specialty pharmacies, to work with the hub for these drug companies to do whatever I have to do. But I also need someone with an MD behind their name to get in there sometimes and push that ball uphill.
