Auth for surgery denied.. who messed up?

I live in NH and work for a company based in MA who uses Blue Cross of MA for insurance.

I was scheduled for surgery on Tuesday with Monday being Columbus Day. I got a call last week from my hospital saying the insurance won’t authorize the surgery until I add a Primary Care provider to my profile. I did that and let them know. On Friday, they called me again and said the auth was denied for the same reason. I called BCBS again and they conformed that I hd listed a Primary Care so I asked them to look into why my surgery was not authorized. After 45 min they told me that the auth needed to come from their parent company, Anthem. Nowhere on my card is Anthem mentioned and the customer service rep said there was nothing he could do. At that point my hospital’s auth dept was closed for the weekend. I got the call today that surgery for tomorrow is cancelled until next week without an auth and the insurance auth dept is closed due to today being a holiday.

I cleared a whole week of work, had to rearrange my whole staff’s schedule (Im a Lead Teacher in an Autism classroom). Now I have to figure out how to take next week off instead. Meanwhile, I am in pain with a 25 mm kidney stone that could be causing permanent damage to my kidney as we speak.

What happened here… did the hospital screw up by not knowing to call Anthem or did BCBS of MA screw up by denying the auth twice and never telling the hospital that they needed to call Anthem instead?

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