About Us: The Lipedema Coverage Connection
Our healthcare system is profit-driven, and coverage decisions are too often made on cost rather than quality and outcomes. Lipedema Coverage Connection exists to change that balance by putting patients in control of their own care.
Our mission is to give patients lifelong skills and knowledge they can use to secure care for themselves and the people they love. Physicians are natural allies in that work, and they are often just as frustrated by the insurance system as their patients. LCC gives patients and physicians a shared platform to tackle coverage issues together, efficiently and effectively.
We Are Patient Advocates
Lipedema Coverage Connection is a web-based service that has helped more than 2,000 women secure close to $300 million in insurance coverage for lipedema surgery. Our team combines experience in healthcare law, medicine, patient advocacy, and media, and we work with some of the country’s most respected lipedema surgeons.
Our results come from proven strategies and exclusive documents, grounded in the latest medical research and years of experience, that help members build compelling cases for prior authorization, network exceptions, and fair payment — without paying cash up front.
Our Legacy
For more than eight years, LCC has been an independent voice for women with lipedema. In that time, we have:
- Helped more than 2,000 women get their lipedema surgery fully covered by insurance
- Driven major changes to insurance policies that once excluded or restricted lipedema treatment
- Built a patient advocacy model designed to make lipedema surgery accessible and affordable for every woman who needs it
Every one of those outcomes came from independent advocacy — not from insurers, not from surgeons, but from women standing up for women.
Our Founders
LCC was co-founded by a healthcare payment and coverage attorney with more than 20 years’ experience at major hospital systems. Her own daughters’ experiences — one with heart surgery as a newborn, the other later diagnosed with lipedema — drew her into patient advocacy, and she designed the LCC process to withstand insurer challenges to prior authorizations and to make lipedema surgery sustainable by ensuring that plastic surgeons would be paid fairly. She has since stepped back from active involvement at LCC to bring that same innovative approach to other diseases facing serious access and payment barriers. Nevertheless, the framework that she created remains the foundation of everything we do.
Our other founder, a board-certified patient advocate, leads LCC today. With a long history of educating patients and providers and a personal commitment to lipedema treatment shaped by his family, he turned the LCC process into an accessible online platform. He continues to develop and refine the process to make it easier and more effective for our members and the surgeons, non-surgeon clinicians, and physical and occupational therapists who serve them. His leadership drives our mission: safe, effective, fully covered lipedema surgery for every woman who needs it.
LCC’s staff includes other board-certified patient advocates who have been affected by lipedema themselves and share that experience with members.
We Are Independent
We do not represent insurance plans or physicians. We will never sell you a plan or refer you to a surgeon for our own benefit. We will share, candidly, what we’ve learned about both.
There is a great amount of misinformation about lipedema surgery. For safety, we believe board-certified plastic surgeons with hospital privileges should treat lipedema. Many insurers, including numerous BCBS plans, reimburse only for care by plastic surgeons, and some states restrict who may perform these procedures. Coverage obtained without a structured process is often partial, unpredictable, or requires upfront payment. LCC exists to change that.
We Are Passionate and Ethical
We believe lipedema surgery is a right, not a privilege reserved for those who can pay. We hold insurers, surgeons, and ourselves to that standard, and we speak plainly about practices that put women at financial or physical risk. Our results speak for themselves.
Our Goal
To make lipedema like any other disease: diagnosed early by a physician rather than discovered on social media, treated close to home, and covered. LCC is proud to help women regain function, reduce pain, and live fuller lives.
This page was updated on 2 January 2022