presidenta13

I'm in Los Angeles. I scheduled an appointment with my dr. and after some discussion, she agreed to initiate the process for me to get lap band surgery. She said I am the first patient she has gone through the process with. The first step is to attend a Bariatric Weight Loss class. Your dr. has to refer you to get into one of those. They called me on Monday and gave me an appointment more than a month from now. I just received a packet in the mail explaining more about the procedure. All the information refers to gastric bypass, so now I'm unsure as to whether or not they will even cover lap band. Again, the dr. was pretty uninformed about Kaiser's policy/process on lap band. The packet also says you have to attend 24 classes, once a week. That's 6 months! Plus assume that there may be some weeks where you have to miss a class. Any missed classes have to be made up. I'm really hoping that's only for people getting gastric bypass - not lap band. I'm really running out of patience. I've been on Weight Watchers for 8 months. I lost 30lbs. in the first 3 months and have been yo yo-ing between -25 and -30 lbs. for the last 5 months. And to further complicate things, I'm staying at a job that I don't really enjoy just so I can get this surgery covered. If I leave my job, I could get UCLA insurance (i'm a student there) but it's not free like the coverage I get through work. So I'm really eager to go to this weight loss class next month. If I find out Kaiser won't cover it, I'll leave my job and start this process through UCLA insurance.