Plastic surgery often becomes a hot topic on social media. Sometimes it’s about chin liposuction being trendy, and other times people are speculating about which celebrities have had which parts of their bodies lifted. But right now, a different kind of story is getting a lot of attention.
Dr. Elisabeth Potter is a board-certified plastic surgeon. She specializes in a type of breast reconstruction surgery called DIEP flap surgery. She said that once, when she had a patient on the operating table under anesthesia, a nurse brought her a message from UnitedHealthcare. An insurance company representative had called the hospital about the patient’s insurance claim. (When Dr. Potter left the operating room for a while, another surgeon was taking care of the patient.)
On January 7, Dr. Potter shared her frustration in a video that she posted on Instagram and TikTok. The video quickly became very popular. In the video, the doctor said, “It’s 2025 and insurance just keeps getting worse.” The Instagram post now has 365,000 likes and more than 13,000 comments. The TikTok video has been watched 5.6 million times and has over 22,000 comments.
A few weeks later, Dr. Potter posted on both platforms again. This time, she shared a letter from a law firm that represents UnitedHealthcare. The letter said that Dr. Potter’s Instagram and TikTok videos about UnitedHealthcare were “defamatory.” The law firm demanded that she remove the videos and post an apology. According to the letter in Dr. Potter’s post, UnitedHealthcare also said that her office had made a mistake by ordering an inpatient hospital stay when they should have ordered an outpatient stay. The insurance company claimed that if they hadn’t made that error, UnitedHealthcare wouldn’t have called.
Dr. Potter told CNN about the response to her January 7 video, “I didn’t think that it would touch people so deeply. Once I saw the comments coming in, it just showed that there was an existing problem.” She said that when she was in surgery and got the message about UnitedHealthcare’s call, she immediately thought, “Oh, wow, are they going to deny something for this patient?” She looked at her fellow surgeon and said, “I think if I take this call, I might be able to help this patient.”
Dr. Potter emphasized that no one forced her to leave the surgery. But she was worried that the insurance company might deny the patient’s claim and make her pay a huge bill that could be financially ruinous. She added, “In the medical environment I work in, when an insurance company tells me to do something, I feel like I have to obey. And that’s not good for patients.”
In early February, as the story was developing, Allure asked UnitedHealthcare for its opinion on Dr. Potter’s social media posts. The company said in a statement, “Intentionally spreading false information on social media is irresponsible and dangerous. Any doctor who risks a patient’s safety just to get popular on social media is destroying the trust in the doctor-patient relationship and in healthcare in general.”
The insurance company’s statement went on, “There’s no situation related to insurance that would ever make a doctor leave a surgery.
Doing that would be a safety risk, and we would never ask or expect a doctor to stop taking care of a patient to return a call. The plastic surgeon’s claim that UnitedHealthcare refused to cover the care for a breast cancer patient is false. UnitedHealthcare had already approved coverage for the care, including an overnight stay.” A spokesperson for UnitedHealthcare also told Allure, “She said her patient could be left with a huge bill, but that’s not true.”
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