In February 2004 I fell while snowboarding and my snowboarding companion insisted on driving me straight to his special back doctor—claiming I needed preventive care even if I no longer felt any pain.

Before I knew it, I made the mistake of allowing this doctor to inject a needle into my upper back to loosen my supposedly tight nerves. The doctor billed my insurance company $935 for this injection, calling it “surgery.” My local Blue Cross Blue Shield carrier paid him $463, the discounted network amount they allowed for his services.

I later looked up this doctor on the web and saw he was a well-known charlatan. I never again had pain or discomfort in my upper back, and I thought the incident was over and forgot about it.

Then, 11 months later in January 2005, when applying for a new family health insurance policy, the carrier "uprated" my entire family premium from $400 to $460 a month claiming that I had a chronic upper back issue requiring continuous medical treatment. When I asked the source of that claim I learned it was the quack back doctor. It seems that the doctor had wirtten on his medical diagnosis that I needed his special type of upper back treatment for the rest of my life.

I phoned the doctor and told his office manager that I knew he was a charlatan, and demanded that he write a letter to my insurance carrier claiming that he was wrong. I told the office manager that I never had any upper back pain following my snowboard incident. The office manager for the doctor agreed, wrote the letter I wanted to my insurance carrier, and the insurance carrier removed their request for the additional uprating of my premium. 

Sixty dollars ($60) a month may not seem like a lot, but once you get a personal insurance policy, your premium goes up with general medical inflation every year from the original base amount. Starting off at $360/year higher ($60/month) would have cost me $31,242 over the expected life of the policy.