New to this forum. need advice.

Hi members I got excited by reading your success stories, and decided to choose surgical weight loss. I do not want to share my plans with my current friends and relatives because they will probably be sarcastic, concidering surgery as a weakness. But I tortured myself with diets all my life, like probably most of you. I am tired,but it is too early to give up,I think. I am 47 y.o. I already sent my application to U.S. BARIARTRIC in Ft Lauderdale. It has been 2 weeks but nobody seems to be in a hurry. I read that it took 2 years for somebody to get the surgery date. Tell me, is that common. Also can somebody give me info/recomendation on following surgeons: Dr.Breslaw, Dr.Hyland, Dr.Klein, Dr.Perez,Michael A. I only know about Dr.Morema, but he is not on my insurance plan. please help me if you can

If you are a candidate for WLS it is usually not that difficult to get all of the medical professionals on-board. The actual scheduling of a proceedure usually only takes a few weeks (a couple of months at the most). However, getting your insurance company to pay for your WLS is a whole other ball game. And your medical professionals will not do any type of scheduling until they know that they are going to get paid. Depending on your insurance, this process can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a year. If this is something you really want to do, you should be prepared for a fight. Maybe it will not come to that, but be prepared none the less. I had a particular crappy time getting coverage through Cigna (it took me over a year to get everything setup). If you are interested I have much of my insurance problems outlined in my profile. Good Luck, Jim

Do you know for sure that your insurance covers WLS? If it does then it should not take all that long to get processed. Unless your surgeon or your insurance requires a lengthy pre-op supervised diet. Some insurance plans do require this. I would check to see what your insurance requires and then go from there. Red

I can't help you with the info for the doctors or the insurance, sorry. I can tell you though that this was the best decision I ever made for myself.

Thank you guys for your responses. I will be in touch. Yan.

Hi Yan, I had my surgery with US Bariatric on 6/9. I have had a great experience with them. I was very motivated and continually called to check on the status of my application. I suggest that you call Lynn (she's in charge of insurance) and ask her the status of your application. There may be some information that your insurance is looking for that you have yet to provide. Hopefully it will be information that is at your fingertips. From the time I gave them a "complete" application to getting my insurance approval was about 10 days. I wish you the best of luck with your approval. In terms of surgeons, my surgery was performed by Dr. Marema. I met a few of Dr. Perez's patients at the hospital and they had nothing but good things to say about him. You've probably already seen them but did you check out his patient's testimonials on this site? Another option may be to go to a support group meeting where you would meet many of his patients. Wish you the best of luck. Susan