Corewell Health and insurance company UnitedHealthcare have reached an agreement after months of deadlock that will restore coverage for tens of thousands of patients in southeast Michigan.
The agreement pertains to Corewell’s legacy Beaumont Hospitals, specifically those patients in employer-sponsored or individual market UnitedHealthcare insurance plans.
Some of those patients found themselves out-of-network earlier this year when Corewell and UnitedHealthcare failed to come to an agreement by Jan. 1 and May 1 deadlines.
Corewell and UnitedHealthcare announced on Thursday, June 25, that they finally reached a new multiyear agreement.
Neither the insurance company nor the health system would specify the length of the new agreement or how much more in reimbursement the Corewell hospitals will be getting.
It is the latest big contract dispute between an insurance company and a health system to be resolved in recent months.
Michigan Medicine and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan reached an agreement in late May that had threatened to knock hundreds of thousands of patients out of in-network coverage on June 30.
For Corewell and UnitedHealthcare, the new agremeent will be retroactive to May 1 for patients of the following hospitals:
For Corewell’s Dearborn, Taylor, Trenton and Wayne hospitals, the agreement will be retroactive to Jan. 1.
Had the agreement not been reached, patients at multiple other Corewell hospitals would have found themselves out-of-network starting July 1.
“We are pleased to share all Corewell Health East hospitals and physicians are in network with UnitedHealthcare for commercial and individual (including exchange) insurance,” the health system said in a statement.
“We have reached a multi-year agreement that restores network access to Corewell Health’s hospitals and providers that were previously out of network for people enrolled in UnitedHealthcare commercial and Individual Family Plan plans, effective immediately,” Dustin Hinton, UnitedHealthcare’s Michigan CEO, said in a statement.
Contact JC Reindl: 313-378-5460 or jcreindl@freepress.com. Follow him on X @jcreindl
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Corewell, UnitedHealthcare reach agreement after months of deadlock
Reporting by JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By JC Reindl, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
