Thank you for your service!

That was the correct course of action.

“ I just started approving everything. "Patient needs emergency surgery for X" "Approved".”

Did they ding you for bad performance after a while? Your job was to maximize denials, not approvals.

I didn't stay long enough to find out, but yeah, they probably would have. The pressure was definitely to default to deny it. That's what the run books (very few) were defaulted to. It was really just a bunch of expendable people to deny claims. The turnover was wild for obvious reasons.