Aetna Spinal Surgery Coverage Class Numbers 382, Patients Say

A lawsuit accusing Aetna Life Insurance Co. of improperly denying coverage for a common spinal surgery by wrongly treating it as experimental should be certified as a class action covering up to 382 people, two Aetna plan participants told a federal judge in Los Angeles.

Brian Hendricks and Andrew Sagalongos want to represent a class of health plan participants who saw their requests for coverage of lumbar artificial disc replacement surgery denied by Aetna. Their motion for class certification, submitted March 5 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, comes one year after Judge Cormac J. ...