HJBR Jan/Feb 2026

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JAN / FEB 2026 9 Editor’s Note: This article is an adaptation from the author’s book, InHumana: An American Healthcare Story , published in October 2025. As an adapted personal account, it reflects the author’sopinions, interpretations,andexperiences.Thefactualdescriptionsreferencedherein are based on publicly available information, including court filings and investigative reporting, which are cited or described in the text. The views expressed do not represent those of US HealthcareJournalsor itsstaff. Last nameshavebeenomitted insomecases toprotect privacy. My mom, Laura Swire, was admitted to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge for a suspected stroke on Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023, three weeks after her 74th birthday. Nearly five months into her recov- ery, I was testifying under oath on the matter to a federal judge for a second time. “It’s almost as if the people in charge of incredibly critical decisions that can liter- ally destroy lives have no basic understand- ing of how the system actually works,”I said during a hearing on the seventeenth day of 2024, “nor any interest in learning about all those we end up losing after their recovery missions are prematurely aborted. Without lots of reserves and a committed crew to help someone in a situation like my mom’s,” I continued with a rocketry analogy, “they’re doomed to come crashing back down, never having a shot at stable orbit because Humana was apparently too interested in ensuring that the stage two propellant goes unspent.” 1 My lament came during a supplemental hearing with the judge. I read from a 2,600- word statement I’d written shortly after our initial hearing with himmore than a month earlier. Humana’s medical appeals special- ist and medical director for grievances and appeals also participated in both telephonic hearings, which involved strange-sounding acronyms, like IRF and SNF. The hearings represented our latest bat- tles waged against an enormous entity I view as soulless surreptitiously using arti- ficial intelligence to aggressively deny criti- cally needed care. That same organization had conscripted this only child and his wife into a war by, in my opinion, repeatedly try- ing to throwmy mom’s life away for the sake of profit, all while gaslighting us with com- pletely contradictory reasons. More than five trying, life-changing months after her stroke, and the subsequent seizures that took away use of her right side, the judge officially ruled Mom the winner of that war in February 2024. By the end of March, she was back home at her condo, liv- ing on her own again, less than a 15-minute drive from the Baton Rouge home where my wife, Edie, and I have lived since 1999. On that Thursday of Mom’s hospital admission, Edie met me in the emergency room of Our Lady of the Lake to witness Mom’s previously impressive vocabulary dwindle down to essentially two words: “help” and “clean.” We occasionally still chuckle about the irony of the latter, given Mom’s noted lack of housekeeping prowess. Following a number of tests the next day, doctors said she’d suffered a series of small strokes, resulting in speech loss, as well as some weakness on her right side. We were told Mom could transfer to an inpatient rehabilitation facility (IRF) by Monday, if not sooner. However, two massive seizures that Friday evening robbed Mom of use of her right side and sent her to the ICU for three days. She made it out of ICU and back to the stroke ward by Monday afternoon. She passed a swallow test on Tuesday, resulting in the removal of her feeding tube, allow- ing Mom to enjoy soft hospital food for din- ner that night. Edie and I saw her make tre- mendous progress during a speech therapy session Wednesday afternoon, after we toured a Baton Rouge IRF that came highly recommended by a longtime friend, Brian, a doctor who happens to be partnered with Mom’s attending physician. I messaged Brian the next day, Thurs- day, Aug. 31, while waiting to learn if Mom’s Medicare Advantage plan would cover the pending transfer to the rehab facility. Would Humana approve what I later learned is called “prior authorization” for critically needed care? Would they deny Mom, forc- ing us to take drastic, out-of-pocket mea- sures to care for a woman we were wholly incapable of caring for at any point in the near future? It was certainly a possibility, according to everything everyone at the hospital told us about Humana in the past week. During that span, we were asked innu- merable times about Mom’s insurance. Whenever we mentioned it was Humana, we invariably got a reaction that cast fur- ther doubt on Mom’s decision to sign up with them for a Medicare Advantage plan. At least a couple staff members had visi- ble shivers when we told them Mom had Humana Gold Plus. That Aug. 31 afternoon, Brian echoed something about the rehab facility that he’d mentioned as part of his recommen- dation. “One good thing about them is that they have people that exist just to fight Humana,” he texted. Brian added that he didn’t want to stress me out about it during his visit to Mom’s room a couple days ear- lier, “but it really is something that happens with Humana all the time, so I wanted you