I was sitting across from a claims adjuster named Todd Briggs when he SLID MY SON’S DENIAL LETTER across the desk like it was a parking ticket.
My son Marcus is eight years old and has leukemia.
We’d been fighting the insurance company for six weeks to approve his bone marrow treatment. Six weeks while his counts dropped and his doctor called me every other day. I’m Diane, and I’ve worked ER for eleven years – I’ve watched people die over paperwork like this. I never thought I’d be on this side of the desk.
Todd said the procedure was “not yet medically necessary.”
I asked him to say that again.
He did.
I took the letter. I thanked him. And I walked out to my car and sat there for a long time.
Then I started paying attention.
Todd Briggs had a LinkedIn. He’d worked for three different insurers in seven years. Each one had been sued for wrongful denial. His name wasn’t in the lawsuits, but it kept showing up in internal documents that got leaked on a healthcare watchdog forum.
I found a woman named Patrice Odom in a Facebook group for parents fighting denials. Her daughter had the same diagnosis as Marcus. Same insurer. Same adjuster.
Her daughter died in February.
I called Patrice that night. She talked for two hours. She’d saved EVERYTHING – every email, every call log, every denial letter with Todd’s signature on it.
A few days later, I connected her with a medical malpractice attorney named Greg Chu who I’d seen in our ER three times visiting clients.
Greg said what Patrice had was enough to open a case.
Then he told me there were four other families.
FIVE CHILDREN. Same adjuster. Same language in every denial letter. Same outcome for three of them.
My hands were shaking when I hung up.
I went back to that office two weeks later, but not alone.
Greg was next to me. A journalist from the state health desk was in the lobby. And Patrice was standing by the door when Todd walked in.
He stopped when he saw us.
Patrice looked at him and said, “I have every single letter you ever signed.”
What I Did in That Parking Lot
I sat in my car for forty-three minutes. I know because I watched the clock on my dashboard.
I didn’t cry. I’ve seen too much to cry easy. I’ve worked nights in a level-two trauma center since Marcus was in diapers, and I’ve held the hands of people whose paperwork killed them just as sure as any disease did. I know what the system looks like from inside. I know how it works.
But sitting in that parking lot, I kept hearing Todd’s voice. Flat, like he was reading from a script, because he probably was. Not yet medically necessary. My son’s bone marrow, his blood, his eight-year-old body fighting something most adults don’t survive, and some man in a gray button-down decided it wasn’t necessary yet.
I drove home. I made Marcus dinner. He ate half of it, which was a good night.
After he was asleep I opened my laptop and typed Todd Briggs into the search bar.
The Pattern
The LinkedIn came up first. Profile photo, professional headshot, the kind of bland corporate smile you’d forget before you finished looking at it. Seven years in claims management. Three companies.
I wrote down all three and spent the next two hours in court record databases that I’d never had reason to touch before. Two of the companies had been sued for wrongful denial. The third had settled out of court, which is its own kind of answer.
Todd’s name wasn’t in any lawsuit directly. But there’s a site, one of those healthcare accountability forums run by patient advocates, and someone had uploaded internal correspondence from one of the settlements. I found his name in a cc line. Then again in an email thread about “utilization review targets.” That phrase. Targets. Like there’s a quota.
I made a folder on my desktop. I named it Todd.
Then I went looking for other families.
The Facebook group had 4,000 members. I searched for posts about bone marrow denials and found more than I expected. I filtered by insurer. Then I started reading.
Patrice’s post was from March. She’d written about her daughter Kezia in the past tense, and something about reading that in a Facebook group, in that font, on that stupid platform with the little reaction buttons underneath, made my stomach drop in a way nothing had in a long time.
I sent her a message at 11:47 at night. I told her who I was and what I did for work and what was happening with Marcus. I said I’d found something and I didn’t know if it mattered but I thought she should know.
She replied at 11:52.
Patrice
She called me instead of typing back. I heard the sound of her house at night, the particular quiet of a house with no kids in it anymore, and I thought about Marcus asleep down the hall and I had to stand up and walk to the window.
She talked for two hours. She was organized in a way I recognized, the kind of organized that grief produces when you can’t fix the thing that’s broken so you document it instead. She had a binder. Physical, three-ring, tabbed. Every call log, timestamped. Every denial letter in a sheet protector. Every voicemail transcribed by hand because she’d read somewhere that transcripts are more useful in court than audio files.
Kezia had been eight too. She’d liked horses and hated math and could do a cartwheel that always ended with her falling sideways and laughing at herself.
Patrice told me all of this at 1 in the morning in a steady voice, and I stood at my window and listened.
Before we hung up she said, “I don’t know what you’re building but I want in.”
Greg Chu
I’d seen Greg in our ER three times over the years, visiting clients who’d been hurt badly enough to end up with us. He was the kind of attorney who showed up in person, which already set him apart. Quiet, always in the same style of dark jacket, the kind of guy who listened more than he talked.
I called his office on a Tuesday. His assistant said he was in trial. I left my name and said it was about a wrongful denial pattern with pediatric cases and multiple families.
He called back in four hours.
I told him about Marcus, about Todd, about the LinkedIn and the court records and the internal documents. Then I told him about Patrice and her binder.
He was quiet for a moment after that last part.
“How complete is her documentation?” he asked.
“Tabbed,” I said.
Another pause. “I’d like to meet with her.”
Then he said there were four other families he already knew about. Different attorneys, different cases, all stalled. Same insurer. Same adjuster name in the paperwork.
Five children total.
Three of them were already gone.
I put my hand flat on the counter because the room had gone sideways on me.
What We Were Building
The next two weeks were the strangest of my life, and I’ve had some strange ones. I was still working shifts. Marcus was still sick. His oncologist, Dr. Renata Ferris, was calling me every couple of days with updates that were professionally worded and quietly urgent. She’d been careful not to say what she was clearly thinking, which was that we were running out of time for running out of time.
But in the margins of those weeks, something else was happening.
Greg connected the five families through a shared document. Patrice’s binder got scanned and catalogued. A pattern emerged in the denial language that Greg said he’d seen before in cases that eventually got classified as bad faith. Same phrases, almost verbatim, across different children, different diagnoses, different states. The kind of sameness that doesn’t happen by accident.
The journalist found us, actually. Greg had a contact at the state health desk, a woman named Sandra Pruitt who’d been covering insurance denials for two years and had a tip line that the patient advocacy forum had linked to. She’d been looking for families willing to go on record. Greg made the introduction.
Sandra was careful. She didn’t promise anything. She said she needed to verify independently, and she did, and she came back ten days later with things we hadn’t even found yet.
I’m not going to say it felt good. Marcus was still sick. Kezia was still gone. But it felt like something.
The Morning We Went Back
We didn’t announce it. That was Greg’s call, and it was the right one.
Todd’s office was in a medical plaza on the north side of town, second floor, glass doors with the company logo frosted into them. I’d been there six weeks earlier in a different version of myself, alone, holding Marcus’s treatment plan in a manila folder, hoping that if I presented everything clearly enough someone would just do the right thing.
We got there at 8:40 a.m. Todd was known to arrive between 8:45 and 9:00. Patrice had noted that in her call logs.
Sandra was in the lobby with a colleague. Not cameras, not yet. Just notebooks and a recorder and the kind of stillness that journalists get when something is about to happen.
Greg stood next to me. He had his briefcase. He hadn’t said much on the drive over.
Patrice was by the door.
She’d driven three hours that morning. She was wearing a green coat and she had her binder under her arm, the physical one, and she looked like someone who had been waiting a long time for a specific moment and had decided not to waste it when it came.
Todd came through the parking garage entrance at 8:51. He had a coffee and his badge on a lanyard and the same flat expression from six weeks ago.
He saw Greg first, I think. Then me. His face did a small, careful thing.
Then he saw Patrice.
She didn’t move toward him. She didn’t raise her voice. She just looked at him the way you look at something you’ve been carrying for a long time and finally put down.
“I have every single letter you ever signed,” she said.
He stood there with his coffee.
Behind him, Sandra’s colleague had a recorder running.
Greg said, “Mr. Briggs, we’d like a few minutes of your time.”
Todd looked at the binder under Patrice’s arm. He looked at Greg’s briefcase. He looked at me, and I don’t know what he saw, but I know what I was thinking about.
Marcus, asleep. The clock on my dashboard. Forty-three minutes in a parking lot.
Three children who didn’t make it.
Kezia, who fell sideways doing cartwheels and laughed every time.
Todd said, “I should call our legal department.”
Greg said, “That would be a good idea.”
Marcus got his treatment approved eleven days later. Dr. Ferris called me at 6 a.m. when it came through. I was already awake.
The case is still open. I’m not allowed to say much more than that.
But Patrice still has her binder.
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If this hit you, pass it on to someone who needs to see it.
For more stories about life’s unexpected turns, you might relate to My Husband Called Me While I Was Watching Him Walk Out of That Elevator or even She’d Been Gone Three Years. Then I Saw Her Jacket Walking Out a Grocery Store Door., and if you’re looking for another tale of insurance woes, check out The Insurance Company Denied My Daughter’s Surgery. Then I Found Out Who Reviewed Her File..
