A Denver man who traveled to Arizona for a specialized neurological evaluation at Mayo Clinic left without being seen after being told he would need to pay a $5,000 pre-service deposit, an episode he has documented in a forthcoming book and that ultimately produced an arbitration finding of consumer fraud against the clinic.
Thomas E. Zordani, a systems-risk analyst with nearly three decades of experience analyzing organizational processes, had provided Mayo with his insurance information and hundreds of pages of medical records before his April 3, 2024, appointment and was told the organization was “good to move forward,” according to his account. When he arrived, he was directed to the Business Office and informed he would not be seen without the deposit.
The next morning, Zordani found an estimate in his Mayo patient portal showing an expected patient cost of $565, with the same document identifying his coverage as “Self-Pay.” He had active insurance, had supplied it to Mayo, and intended to use it.
Rather than leave the matter as a frustrating encounter, Zordani applied the analytical methods of his profession, tracing the outcome backward through people, processes, classifications, information and decisions. What began as a spreadsheet grew into what he calls a “legal genome”—a detailed investigative map linking dates, departments, insurance activity, internal notes, telephone records, estimates and legal positions, allowing him to test chronology and identify contradictions.
A turning point came when Mayo produced a recording of a 2023 call Zordani did not remember making. “I was listening to my own voice in a conversation I had no memory of,” Zordani said. “It showed me how badly my condition had affected me—and it taught me something equally important: memory was not enough. I had to follow the evidence.”
The matter matters beyond one patient’s experience because it exposes how the classification of a patient—insured versus self-pay—can determine access to care, and how difficult it is for an individual to reconstruct what happened inside a complex health system that holds the systems, employees and internal records. Zordani built his case from the outside while working with a small Arizona legal team, and the dispute eventually reached arbitration, where the finding of consumer fraud was issued against Mayo Clinic.
“I cannot undo what happened to me,” Zordani said. “But if showing exactly how I reconstructed it helps someone else recognize when the pieces do not fit, then the investigation has value beyond my own case.”
His book, Classification: How an Insured Patient Was Made Self-Pay—and Took on Mayo Clinic and Won, is scheduled for release November 1, 2026. Zordani said his work focuses on tracing visible outcomes back to the rules, processes, classifications and decision structures that produced them—an approach his own case put to an unusually personal test.
