I find often that when speaking with insurance agents that regardless of whether they know what is right or not, they have an agenda to disallow things. It's a company designed to make money for the stockholders after all as their primary reason to exist. A new Rx drug is always a pain in the rear to get them to approve for instance, in my own case.

Don must be working with some extraordinary agents at the insurance companies as his experience does not parallel the experience of hundreds of people that call OCF with regularity that are have difficulties with their insurance companies. While any business has helpful and less so people in it, and any comment positive or negative about them is going to have exceptions, but for profit insurance companies have a history of behaving badly. Hence the need for the government to step in all too often and regulate them.

All that being said, I think that both Don and Christine's ideas that being polite is the obvious starting point is valid. But it does not always work unfortunately, and we as patients spend far too much time writing letters, documenting treatments that are necessary and needed, asking doctors to write letters that they should not have to, to justify a particular treatment or medication decision to the insurance company. Persistence, and even complaints to the state insurance commission are too often necessary. Bart's comment about the press is a tactic that we have used in the past, and companies in general do not like to be shown in a negative light publicly. You don't get what you deserve (and have paid for), you get what you negotiate or fight for, is a phrase that I hear far too often related to insurance companies.