Lyme Disease Patients Denied Coverage For Treatment

A deer tick, a vector of Lyme disease and its coinfections

Below is an excerpt from the Times Herald Record on how insurance companies are screwing over patients by refusing to cover the costs of treating Lyme disease. Read more below and contact Envita if you have any questions about how our treatment exceeds the typical "throw some antibiotics down your throat and cross your fingers approach."

Scores of local victims of a disease they say makes them so weak they can't drive, think clearly or make tea without laying down are being denied insurance payments for treatment of that disease.

This is despite the fact that the antibiotic Rocephin alleviates the symptoms of Lyme disease, say many patients who have used it and doctors and nurses who have treated them with it.

So in order to get the treatment for more than the 28 days allowed by many companies – or in some cases, to get it at all – victims like Kristin Raucci of Pine Bush, Scott Owens of Kerhonkson and Doreen Peone of Saugerties must pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per month, often going broke or even, in the case of Owens, losing a business in the process. 

What makes this even more frustrating to these victims of the tick-borne disease is that nearby Connecticut has a law requiring insurance companies to pay for that long-term treatment of Lyme.

“Until New York does something like that, there's nothing we can do,” says a spokeswoman for the New York Attorney General's Office, which filed an appeal to Raucci's insurance company, MVP, after it denied her request for more treatment with Rocephin. The attorney general's office – whose appeal of Raucci's case was also denied – says it's seen other cases like Raucci's, although it couldn't say how many.

“That's a sin,” says registered nurse Debbie Moll of New Jersey, who's treated many local patients with long-term intravenous doses of Rocephin and said “they absolutely did get better.”