Patti Sietz-Honig, a video editor at Fox 5 in New York City, filed a complaint in 2022. The cost of seeing a specialist for chronic back pain had risen and she faced about $60,000 in bills.
Ms. Sietz-Honig pressed for updates on her complaint and sent articles critical of MultiPlan from the Capitol Forum, a website focused on antitrust and regulatory news. Last March, the agency emailed her that her employer and her insurer, Aetna, had agreed to a “temporary exception” and made additional payments.
“Unfortunately,” the agency wrote, the law “does not prohibit the use of third-party vendors” to calculate payments.
Meanwhile, her longtime pain specialist began demanding a down payment. To save money, Ms. Sietz-Honig split her appointments.
“I’ve been in a lot of pain lately,” he said, “so I’ve been going — and paying.”
“Not a real deal”
As MultiPlan became deeply integrated with large insurers, it introduced new tools and techniques that yielded even higher fees and in some cases told insurers what unnamed competitors were doing, documents and interviews show.
After meeting in 2019 with a MultiPlan executive, a UnitedHealthcare senior vice president wrote in an internal email that other insurers are using MultiPlan’s aggressive pricing options more widely and that UnitedHealthcare could catch up.
“Dale didn’t specifically name the competitors, but from what he said we were able to learn who was who,” wrote the executive, Lisa McDonnel, referring to Dale White, then executive vice president of MultiPlan. He described how Cigna, Aetna and some Blue Cross Blue Shield plans apparently used MultiPlan.
