Nearly three-quarters of Americans now say that health insurance companies delaying or denying medically necessary care is a major problem, according to new survey data highlighted by CBS News. The industry's response to this crisis has been, roughly, nothing. So a startup has spotted the gap and decided to sell you insurance against your insurance.
The Problem Nobody in Power Wants to Solve
Let's just sit with the number for a second. Seventy-three percent. That is not a niche complaint. That is not a fringe position. That is nearly every American who has ever had to deal with a health insurer saying, out loud, that the system is broken in a specific and painful way.
CBS News Sunday Morning surfaced this figure as part of its annual Money Issue broadcast, in a segment examining how insurance companies routinely deny coverage for procedures that doctors have specifically requested. Not procedures patients dreamed up themselves. Procedures their physicians determined were medically necessary. Denied anyway.
The insurance industry has spent decades building an apparatus specifically designed to say no. Prior authorizations. Step therapy requirements. Peer-to-peer reviews that somehow always find in favor of the insurer. It is a machine optimized not for your health but for the company's quarterly earnings, and it is working exactly as intended.
Enter Sheer Health, Selling You a Ladder Out of the Hole
Here is where the dark comedy really kicks in. A company called Sheer Health has entered the market with a pitch that would be funny if it weren't so revealing: they will fight your insurance battles for you. You pay them. They argue with your insurer. Presumably this goes better than when you do it yourself, exhausted and terrified, while also managing a diagnosis.
CBS News correspondent Susan Spencer examined the company's model, which functions essentially as a meta-insurance product. Insurance against the failure of your insurance. A buffer layer between you and the bureaucratic labyrinth that stands between you and your prescribed care. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's senior policy officer Katherine Hempstead also weighed in on the segment, lending some academic weight to what is otherwise a fairly damning indictment of the status quo.
Sheer Health is not the villain of this story. They are filling a void. But the fact that this void exists, that it is large enough to build a business inside of, tells you everything about how catastrophically the baseline system has failed.
Who Gets to Fight Back?
Here is the question CBS did not fully answer, though to be fair it is a Sunday morning lifestyle broadcast and not a Senate hearing: who can afford Sheer Health?
The people most devastated by insurance denials are not, generally speaking, people with disposable income to spend on a service that helps them access care they have already paid premiums to receive. They are people working two jobs, managing chronic illness, trying to keep their kids covered. The people who can most easily absorb the cost of a denial-fighting service are, probabilistically, the people with the most resources to fight back on their own.
A product that charges for access to a fair appeals process is not a solution to healthcare inequality. It is a concierge layer that makes the inequality slightly more comfortable for those who can pay for it. That distinction matters.
The Bigger Picture Nobody on TV Wants to Say Plainly
Katherine Hempstead, whose book 'Uncovered: The Story of Insurance in America' was referenced in the segment, has spent years documenting the gap between what American health insurance promises and what it delivers. That gap is not an accident. It did not emerge from administrative confusion or well-intentioned miscommunication.
Insurance companies deny claims because denying claims saves them money, and because the appeals process is deliberately difficult enough that a large percentage of denials are never challenged. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis cited extensively in prior reporting, insurers on the Affordable Care Act marketplace denied roughly 17 percent of in-network claims in 2021. Of the tiny fraction that got appealed, the policyholder won more than 40 percent of the time. The denials were not all medically justified. They were, in a meaningful number of cases, just wrong. But they stuck because most people do not have the time, energy, or knowledge to fight.
That is the market Sheer Health is entering. That is what 73 percent of Americans are describing when they say this is a major problem.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a functioning healthcare system produces a startup whose entire value proposition is 'we will argue with your insurance company for you.' You are supposed to nod along and call this innovation. You are supposed to be grateful that the market stepped in.
It is not innovation. It is a toll booth erected at the entrance to care you already paid for. The innovation was always available. It is called 'not denying medically necessary procedures in the first place.' No startup required. No additional monthly fee. Just honoring the basic contract that insurance is supposed to represent. The fact that this sounds naive in 2026 is the whole problem.
Luigi Mangione became a household name last year in part because something about the health insurance denial machine finally broke through the noise and made ordinary people furious in a way that was impossible to dismiss. That fury did not evaporate. It is sitting right there under the surface of that 73 percent figure, waiting. Congress has done essentially nothing structural in response. The industry has done nothing. And now we have a startup charging you to access the appeals process that should have been functional all along. Sleep tight.
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