Robert Whitfield MD explains why health insurance won't cover breast explant surgery: there's no ICD10 code for breast implant illness, so insurers have no medical diagnosis to justify the procedure.
Today we're going to discuss the question, is breast explant surgery covered by insurance? And we get asked this question routinely. And currently, breast implant illness does not have an ICD10 code, which is International Classification of Disease code. So from coding, it's hard to get this covered because it's not recognized. Typically, what we use for the ICD10 code for this is breast pain, because that's indicative of this issue. Many of my patients, if not all of them, have experienced breast pain at one time or another.
