The 15-year-old tried to absorb the devastating news relayed by her parents: that their insurance company, Aetna, denied her for a minimally invasive brain surgery that could end the seizures that have haunted her since she was 9 years old. Cara is one of those million people, or at least she thought she would be until her doctors scheduled her for a laser ablation surgery in New York on October 23. Her doctors recommended a laser ablation to remove lesions in her brain that are causing her epilepsy, but the family’s insurance provider Aetna told Cara’s parents, Julianne and Robert, of New York, that the surgery was still ‘experimental.’ 
 
 ‘Considering they’re denying me getting surgery and stopping this thing that’s wrong with my brain, I would probably just say, “Screw you,”‘ Cara told CNN. Instead of removing a larger portion of her skull and cutting away brain matter in the procedure the company would cover, a laser ablation would have allowed surgeons to drill a small hole in to Cara’s head, and finely target the lesions with a laser to remove them. In denying Cara her surgery, Aetna said it considers laser ablation surgery "experimental and investigational for the treatment of epilepsy because the effectiveness of this approach has not been established." ‘However, effectiveness and member safety will always be the most important factors in determining our clinical policies.’ 
 
 The company said that it had conducted an ‘extensive review,’ and that the approved lobectomy ‘is supported by a larger body of evidence.’ 
 
 The US Food and Drug Administration approved the first system for laser ablation in the brain in 2010. "There is currently a limited amount of evidence-based, clinical studies related to laser ablation surgery. But The Epilepsy Foundation’s chief scientist, Dr Jaqueline French says that ‘most surgical techniques, even common ones, have not been subjected to standard placebo-controlled trials, as [surgical trials]are much more complex for a number of reasons.’ 
 
 On the other hand, temporal lobectomies provide good results for about 85 percent of patients, while between 10 and 15 percent have little to no improvement. Ultimately, his son’s surgery was a success, but Gattone added that the foundation has seen that epilepsy patients and their families ‘are facing more barriers to physician-directed care.’ 
 
 Dr French says that, compared to laser ablation, a lobectomy can come at ‘a substantially higher monetary and personal cost.’ Phil Gattone, CEO of The Epilepsy Foundation said in a statement: ‘As a parent with a very young child, it was extremely challenging for our family to make a decision to remove part of our child’s skull and brain for a surgery that we hoped would end the devastation of seizures that were stopping his development,’ he said. The company refused to cover Cara’s operation, a devastating blow to the hopeful teen and her family. But just three days before her operation was to take place, her parents, Julianne and Robert got a letter from the family’s insurance company, Aetna. About three million people in the US suffer of epilepsy of some form. Removing them could well free Cara from her terrifying bouts of cold, shaking seizures.
– When Cara Pressman gets seizures, she describes it as "like having a nightmare but while you're awake," giving her the chills and the shakes and causing her to zone out for up to two minutes. So the 15-year-old, who a release says is from New York and has suffered from seizures since she was 9, was elated when she was set in October for a minimally invasive brain surgery called laser ablation that could end her trauma, per CNN. But just days before the procedure, it was canceled, because Aetna, the family's insurance company, denied the coverage, saying the surgery is "experimental" for epilepsy and "the effectiveness of this approach has not been established." Instead, Aetna approved a more expensive temporal lobectomy, despite laser ablation being FDA approved and a Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon saying the procedure is a well-regarded one. "There's a lot of data out there to suggest it's effective for epilepsy," Dr. Jamie Van Gompel says. Plus, patients who have laser ablation recover more quickly than those who undergo traditional brain surgery—in less than two weeks, instead of up to three months—and have less pain and less risk of complications, per Van Gompel. "It's just so frustrating for us to know there's … a way to fix our daughter, and some bureaucratic machine is preventing this from happening," Cara's dad says. Her parents say while they're appealing, they'll consider dipping into their retirement funds and finding other means to pay for the $300,000 out-of-pocket cost. Cara's take to Aetna, six weeks and more than two dozen seizures later: "Considering they're denying me getting surgery and stopping this thing that's wrong with my brain, I would probably just say, 'Screw you.'"