Dear Patients and Colleagues,
We sincerely thank you for your continued support. As many of you know, our practice has proudly served the greater Tampa Bay community—and beyond—for over three decades.
Despite Florida Blue’s stated commitment to “serving all Floridians in the pursuit of health,” the company provided notice to us that they unilaterally terminated our long-standing contract without cause, stating ambiguously: “As part of our ongoing evaluation and assessment of our network, we have made the decision to terminate our relationship based on network need with your organization.”
This decision comes amid Florida Blue’s recent large-scale layoffs and highly publicized disputes with BayCare and other major health systems throughout Florida.
In response, we launched this petition to demonstrate the true network need for our services and to raise public awareness about the broader impact of such actions. These corporate decisions not only threaten patients’ direct access to care but also destabilize the larger healthcare landscape when even a single insurer withdraws coverage from established community providers.
On Tuesday, October 21, 2025, we reached out to our Florida Blue provider relations and contracting contacts to share our petition and the strong community support behind it, as well as to reiterate the harm this termination poses to our patients, their members, and the larger community. Unfortunately, the only response we received was from our assigned Provider Solutions Advisor—whose online profile reads that she is “here to serve and engage with our providers”—asking she be “removed from all email threads at this time.”
On October 27th, we again attempted to reach out for update, or any response, and presented a deadline of end of day October 30th. Unfortunately, Florida Blue has can continued to act irrationally and unprofessionally, blocking our domain and refusing to answer nor transfer our phone calls. I reached out via my personal email address and the only response back was "Hello". This is not the level of transparency and accountability Floridians deserve from their health insurer and we believe they need to be held accountable.
Now is the time for action.
Open enrollment for Medicare beneficiaries is open now and for all others seeking health insurance open enrollment begins on November 1st.
To protect our own employees, our practice has taken advantage of our options and terminated Florida Blue as our provider of employer-sponsored health insurance and we encourage you all to do the same.
While we recognize that changing coverage can be burdensome and may not be possible for everyone, we still encourage those who are able to stand with us in this effort. If you receive insurance through your employer, please consider asking your HR department to reevaluate their choice of insurer—one that truly lives up to its promise of serving the people of Florida. If you are unable, we ask you continue to share our petition with others to continue to bring awareness to our cause and the dangers of irrational corporate healthcare decisions.
Every Floridian deserves access to consistent, compassionate, and reliable healthcare. Together, we will continue to fight to make that a reality.
With gratitude,
The Malka Institute of Neuroscience and Disease