About one in nine treatment requests was denied last year.
Before a health plan will cover certain treatments, a doctor has to get it approved first. That is prior authorization, and for the first time plans are now required to publish how often they say yes and how often they say no.
Project Crossfoot collects those filings — 658 of them, from 124 insurers across 48 states — and puts them in one place, where they add up to a 11.0% denial rate. Every figure came from the plan's own document, and every one has been checked against itself. Some of them do not add up.
Standard denial rate by market
Volume-weighted across all filings that publish counts. Every rate is computed from extracted counts — never generated.
Highest rates among plans with 1,000+ standard requests
Where plans land, and what happens after a denial
Three views of the same 529 filings that published usable counts. The distribution shows where the industry actually sits — most plans cluster low, and the long tail to the right is the story. The funnel shows what happens after "no": how few denials are ever appealed, and how often an appeal works. Every bar and every band opens the filings behind it.
Where denials run highest
Volume-weighted denial rate across every filing that names a state. National and multi-state filings carry no state and are not on the map — this is the geography of what was published, not an estimate of what was not.
Four ways into the data
The full dataset serves as read-only JSON — the same numbers behind every chart on this page, no account, no key.