Have you never known anyone in your life for whom this was a requirement? This is a pretty common occurrence for the less well-off folks I've known as the risk profile for lower-income insurance markets puts the cost analysis toward requiring referrals to "prevent excessive utilization."

The inevitable outcome when you have such segregated risk pools.

I have family members who qualify for subsidized Obama healthcare on my state’s marketplace based on income. Their kid has another special state provided insurance.

It’s an interesting question I will ask them.

What does Medicade and Medicare do? I’d imaging there are more hoops to jump through with government plans.

Well maybe this is more to my point: I don’t know how my insurance plan maps to what I’m required to do in terms of seeking care. But I do know that if I guess wrong I’m looking at paying my entire deductible, so what I end up doing is avoiding the medical system as much as possible.

My point is just that if it’s an app on my phone, it’s a lot different. I’m probably going to sign up for this.

My healthcare plan has a website and you can put in a zip to see who is around you. They should list in network doctors, if there are only out of network doctors you can call the insurance and get an authorization.

United Healthcare dropped a large provider in my state for a few months and I had to do the authorization thing to see my regular doc. No out of network changes.