This Woman's Health Insurance Company Assigned Her a Dead Doctor

Getting a new insurance company can be stressful under normal circumstances. But, one woman discovered that there can be a whole new level of dread when it comes to having to set up your healthcare services with a new company, after she was assigned a new primary care physician — also known as a PCP — who had actually died several months prior.

The woman shared the story of how her insurance company assigned her a dead PCP on Instagram, which instantly went viral, highlighting just how common insurance companies assign folks healthcare providers that are out of network, retired, or just like in this case, deceased.

You can learn more about the story below.

Instagrammer @molliedonihe told her followers this wild story in a video: Her health insurance plan changed at the beginning of the year, and assigned her a new PCP. So she logged onto her new insurance company's website for the first time, and tried to change her assigned PCP to the one she has been seeing for years, when she received a weird error message from the company.

Unable to make the switch after several attempts, Mollie told her followers that she decided to look up the new doctor's info out of curiosity.

Instead of learning more about his practice, or even his office hours, Mollie said she found his obituary! The doctor had died in May 2024, eight months prior to when he was assigned as her new caregiver.

What's worse, Mollie said that when she went back into the system to see if she could figure out anything else about the next steps she should take to get this fixed, she discovered that her insurance company had also marked him as out of network.

"So, the PCP that they assigned me is an out of network dead guy," Mollie said.

The caption of her video did say that she eventually planned to pick up the phone to call her insurance company and get things fixed, but that she just had to share her experience because of how unusual it was. Only, it turns out that Mollie's story isn't actually that unique, according to her followers.

The comments on Mollie's post were full of people sharing surprisingly similar tales of their own, with one person saying that the medical office they were assigned to turned out to be a Burger King location instead.

Another commenter said that their friend once showed up to their doctor's appointment, only to learn that their PCP had met a similar fate, writing, "My friend showed up for her [appointment]. The office was full of flowers. She asked if it was the doctor’s birthday? No, he died two weeks ago."

And while there were a lot of funny jokes posted about the incident — my personal favorite was, "High deductible plans are wild like this, 'cause even the doctor is deductible from the plan" — it does highlight the very real problems plaguing American healthcare at the moment.

Hopefully Mollie was eventually able to get her PCP changed to one who was both in network and among the living. At least she was able to laugh about it for a bit!