"Prior Auth Parasite"

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares his poem, “Prior Auth Parasite,” which was featured in the March 2026 issue of Psychiatric Times.

In this poem, Berlin asks, how much do you hate dealing with prior authorizations, AKA “prior auths”?

Prior authorizations are a utilization management strategy used by health insurance companies to determine if they will cover a prescribed procedure, service, or medication. Doctors and other health care providers spend thousands of nonreimbursed hours intended to act as a safety and cost-saving measure by health insurance companies, even as current prior authorization practices cost the US health care system between $23 and $31 billion annually for hours spent collecting information for review, often on lengthy phone calls.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 28 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.