SHREVEPORT, La. (KTAL/KMSS) – A Shreveport transwoman doctor just received good news after three companies withheld hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from her.

Dr. Tiffany Najberg, the owner of Shreveport UrgentEMS, says three insurance companies: Cigna, Humana and Aetna, refused to change the name in their databases to reflect her new legal name.

Najberg and her clinic have lost almost $200,000 in insurance payments in what she thinks was a personal attack.

“Horrible feeling, it makes me feel like I’m not even a person, like to a lot of the world I don’t even exist,” says Najberg, who was using her wife’s savings account to keep the clinic open.

“Since women change name all the time when marriage occurs or divorce occurs. The only thing I could even possibly think about was the fact that I am transgender.”

Najberg says this has been an ongoing battle since last February, but it wasn’t until December of 2022 that she was able to find out the real reason for not getting paid.

“The reason that things kept hitting a snag was that my name in their internal database was appearing under my dead name, my old name, which hadn’t been legally my name since April of 2021.”

But Najberg got the good news on Monday afternoon. All three insurance companies will reimburse her.

“I received word from my forensics billing expert that they had agreed to terms that my name had been fully change in their database and they’re going to reprocessed all of our claims and also credentials that were effective immediately.”

Najberg says strangers all came together to push for this much-needed change. She started an online petition at Change.org, which garnered over 11,000 signatures as of Monday evening.

“Most people recognize that you just can’t not pay someone because you don’t like them. So the responses have been very supportive, and very positive,” she says.