UnitedHealthcare has sent a threatening legal letter to a top plastic surgeon who has spoken out against the insurance giant.
Dr. Elizabeth Porter is a professionally certified plastic surgeon in Austin, Texas. After the assassination of UnitedHealth chief Executive Brian Thompson in December, Dr. Porter, like many doctors, condemned some of the company’s practices.
Last month, Dr. Porter posted a video on TikTok. In the video, she said she was performing plastic surgery on a breast cancer patient when she received a call from United Health Insurance. After leaving the operating room, Dr. Porter said the insurance representative told her she needed information about the patient’s diagnosis to determine “whether her hospitalization was justified.”
Now, after her story spread, the insurance company has hit back at Dr. Porter with a lengthy legal letter. The letter asked her to “correct social media posts you made that you knew were false, misleading and defamatory to UnitedHealth.”
The company strongly denied Dr Porter’s claim that she was forced to interrupt surgery that day to take a call. The company said she would not have received the call if her office had not “erroneously scheduled a hospital stay when in fact it should have been an outpatient observation.”
Clarke Locke LLP, a defamation law firm representing the insurer, said in the letter, “Let’s be clear: any claim that UnitedHealth asked you to interrupt your surgery or that the call was urgent is false.” Unitedhealth neither requires nor would ever expect a physician to interrupt a patient’s care in order to return a call about a notification error or other insurance matter.”
While the company did not threaten legal action, Dr Porter was told that “you may be held liable for the damage caused by your misrepresentation and your re-dissemination of the misrepresentation”, adding that they wanted her to contact every media outlet that had reported her claims to let those outlets know that her claims were “false”.
In her original video, which has been viewed 5.5 million times, Dr Porter, wearing a blue surgical cap, says: “It’s 2025 and the insurance situation is getting worse. I just performed two bilateral inferior abdominal perforator flaps (DIeps) and two bilateral tissue dilators. This had never happened to me before, but during the second DIEP, I got a call in the operating room saying that UnitedHealth had asked me to call back about a patient who was in surgery today and who was actually asleep under anesthesia on the operating table. I was told I had to call back immediately. So I stopped what I was doing and called UnitedHealth. The gentleman said he needed some information about the patient and wanted to know her diagnosis and whether her hospitalization was justified.”
When Dr. Porter then asked the employee if she knew the patient was under anesthesia and had breast cancer, she said she was told she didn’t and that “that’s a matter for another department.”
Dr Porter continued: “Yeah, it’s getting out of hand. The insurance industry is out of control. I don’t know what else to say.”
She later explained in a follow-up post that there was another surgeon in the operating room at the time, who watched the patient while she answered the phone.
In a video posted just three days after Dr. Porter made the claims, she said she received a call from UnitedHealth about her post.
She said a company representative left a message for her and she tried to call back, but she was put on hold and never reached the right person.
A few weeks later, Dr. Porter said she received a demand letter from Clarke Locke’s law firm. The law firm, which describes itself as “America’s leading law firm,” previously received a nearly $800 million settlement from Fox News on behalf of Dominion Voting Systems. In the letter, released in full by Dr. Porter, the law firm accused the doctor of erred in patient scheduling and also accused her of allowing “threatening, harassing and intimidating comments directed at UnitedHealth” to appear on her social media pages.
The law firm also said UnitedHealth representatives had intended to leave a message when they found out she was in surgery.
The letter read: “Your claims are false. You obviously know they’re fake. You have publicly blamed UnitedHealth for mistakes in your office, setting off a dangerous storm of misinformation.”
The letter went on to demand that Dr. Porter “make things right,” remove her post, publicly apologize to UnitedHealth, contact any media outlets that reported on her post to retract her account, and denounce “threats of violence against our customers as a result of your post.”
In a video released Monday, Dr. Porter admitted she found the demand letter “a little intimidating,” but vowed: “When it comes to speaking up for my patients, I will not be intimidated into silence.”
She then went on to complain about the insurance company’s handling of her patients’ cases, saying it was “worse than this letter she received.”
Dr Porter argues: “Overnight hospitalization after major surgery is not an option, it is medically necessary. But UnitedHealth thinks they know better than the doctors who care for the patients.”
She went on to defend her actions: “They called me while I was in surgery, and I knew that if I didn’t get out there and respond right away, they might refuse to admit the patient, which would leave her with a huge bill. So, with another surgeon in the operating room watching, I stopped and called back.”
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