Health Insurance

Dealing with health insurance and other benefits can be very confusing. If you have questions, please call your insurance representative to better understand how your policy works and what it covers.

Please bring your Medicare, Medi-Cal or insurance identification card to your visit at UCSF Medical Center. Your insurance may require prior authorization before seeing a UCSF doctor. If so, please ask your primary care doctor or insurance company to fax your authorization to the UCSF doctor's office and bring a copy to your appointment to ensure you aren't billed for services covered by your insurance. You may be called for insurance or authorization information before your appointment.

Your insurance may require an office co-payment. If so, you will be asked to make your co-payment in full at your visit. If your visit is not covered by a health plan or insurance, you will be asked to pay for your visit on arrival. For your convenience, we accept cash, checks and credit cards.

UCSF Medical Center contracts with many major health insurance companies. A list of health insurance companies that provide coverage for our services is available below.

Our hospitals and doctors do not contract with or participate in any health insurance discount card programs. They do, however, accept payments made through health savings account programs. We also can make financial arrangements for your coverage with other health insurance companies, if the companies are willing to do so. Please ask your insurance company or your UCSF doctor to contact our Health Plan Strategy and Contracting office.

For background information, a glossary of health insurance terms and an explanation of private and public health coverage are available.

If you need help finding a doctor, please contact our Physician Referral Service. We can provide information about the more than 900 doctors at UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Children's Hospital.

Physician Referral Service

We also have an online directory of our doctors. Our doctors are members of the UCSF Medical Group and are full-time faculty members of the University of California, San Francisco.

The following is a list of the companies that currently have contracts with us.