It’s 5:00 PM, and I spent four hours today trying to straighten out the problems with my health insurance account, getting the runaround and being pushed back and forth between Florida Blue and Healthcare.gov.
I was informed in October that the insurance plan I had last year wouldn’t be offered in 2016, so they were putting me in their new shitty HMO, the cleverly-named ‘MyBlue’. The extra added benefit was that my primary care physician doesn’t take that insurance. In order to stick with my doctor, I’d have to shell out an addition $500 a month for a plan she’s on. An additional feature that came with this plan was the requirement that all my prescriptions be filled at either Navarro (? never heard of it) or CVS (lucky me).
Not having that kind of money to spare these days, I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to find a new doctor. That was bad enough, but you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.
I went to fill a prescription the other day. It’s generic thyroid medication, and under this new plan, my cost should be $5, but I was charged $16.
So today, after my show, I thought I’d take a few minutes to call Florida Blue and find out why. But somehow, the claims department couldn’t even find the claim!
So I pulled up my account on floridablue.com and lo and behold, they have me enrolled in TWO plans. Even though I presented my NEW insurance card at CVS with the new policy number on it, somehow they put the claim under the old policy (which shouldn’t have even gone through as it’s expired!).
The Florida Blue rep who answered after I waited over 30 minutes said she couldn’t help me, so I asked to speak with a supervisor. When she was (allegedly) transferring me, the call dropped. Keep in mind that each time I had to call back, it involved at least 30 minutes of waiting on hold until a human being picked up the phone.
When I finally got back through, the next person I spoke with said I needed billing. But the person in billing said I had to call the exchange.
Are you feeling the frustration yet? I thought so.
So, I called the exchange, and waited and waited, only to get a clueless rep on the phone. When I asked to speak with a supervisor, I was conveniently disconnected again. (I truly believe they do this on purpose. Instead of getting a supervisor they just hang up so they don’t have to deal with a problem situation.)
When I finally got through to a supervisor at healthcare.gov, she said it was a Florida Blue problem, and she couldn’t get into their system to change anything. When I begged her to pick up the phone to talk with someone over there to get it straightened out, she said they couldn’t do that, but she could escalate a ticket digitally.
If I didn’t tell her to fuck off at that point, I certainly felt like it.
So, here I was, incredulous about the fact that 20% of my premium dollars go to administrative costs at Florida Blue, but every time I call, I have to wait at least 30 minutes to get my call answered.
But I figured I’d give it one last shot. In my case, the umpteenth time and the fourth hour was a charm.
By this time, I realized that it had to be a fuck-up on the part of the insurance company. Even though my former policy was no longer in effect, it was still linked to my account. The idiots at CVS didn’t bother to check that the account they put the prescription through actually matched the number on the card I handed them, so they put it through the wrong one!
I thought I’d approach it differently this time. I went right to the billing department where, after waiting the requisite 33 minutes, a nice man named Richard asked if he could help me. I told him he had no idea how much I hoped he could.
This time, I made it simple. I said that, for some reason, my old expired & discontinued policy was still showing up as active on my account, along with my new policy, creating all kinds of problems. He asked if he could put me on hold to look into it, and I just made him promise he wouldn’t cut me off before I said yes.
When he returned, he apologized for the wait and said he’d be able to take care of it! Of course, he’ll have to escalate his own ticket, but he said it should all be taken care of in 2-3 days.
I’m sitting here wondering why
- I couldn’t have gotten that guy on the phone in the first place
- With all the money Florida Blue and the rest of the for-profit health insurance government-sanctioned extortionists make, they
can’twon’t hire enough staff to adequately service their clients - If you get disconnected they won’t call you back, even though they just asked for your phone number so you know they have it
- None of these crooks are ever accountable for the shit they put us through on a daily basis
Seriously, after FOUR FUCKING HOURS trying to get my old, expired policy off my account so that I can use the new policy I’m paying for, I’m now sick. Mentally and physically ill from the stress that built up in me during those four frustrating hours.
Regular listeners of my show know that I suffer from depression. It gets debilitating when I’m hit by a particularly tough episode. And thanks to my insurance company, I’m in the middle of one right now.
Yes. My insurance company and this insane system of government-sanctioned extortion for healthcare quite literally made me sick today. And the only cure in sight comes from Bernie Sanders and his fight for Medicare for All. Let’s put the crooks out of business and make healthcare a right instead of a privilege.
As of now, I will not be doing a show tomorrow. I will take a mental health day and prepare myself for the hassle that will undoubtedly greet me tomorrow afternoon as I have my first appointment with my new insurance-company dictated primary care physician.
Oh joy. I can’t wait.
BTW, Nicole, Navarro is a Latino-owned pharmaceutical chain. There’s several in my neighborhood. BTW, typical of Latin-owned businesses, every one I’ve been in sells groceries (that’s like CVS), but also jewelry, and a lot of other items. It can be an unusual place to go into if you’ve never been before.
[…] I wrote all about it here yesterday… […]
Healthcare used to be non-profit, at least the hospitals..
I am in complete agreement with you that this system is a mess. Because it is. I have had the same experience you describe above with United Healthcare, with Aetna, with Blue Cross…with all of them. I remember something Ezra Klein used to say, back when I was a weekend contributor at his blog: the delays, the frustrations, the denials, the putting-off, the high co-pays, etc. ARE THEIR BUSINESS MODEL. The longer they can delay your claim–or discourage you from even trying to get them to pay a claim, or reimburse you for something they should have covered in the first place, or adjust your policy so that you don’t get stuck with even more outlays of cash that they will again take months to reimburse–the longer YOUR money stays in THEIR hands. In other words, PROFIT.
It’s an algorithm, I swear. They know that people only have so many hours in the day. If they have enough employees, with enough knowledge, to handle your needs in an expeditious fashion, the algorithm fails. In order for it to work, there has to be delay and discouragement. Every time. They know that given X number of hours of delay, a certain percentage of people will just give up and say, fuck it. That’s now money in their pockets. Even if you persist and keep calling back until matters are resolved, that’s still days and weeks and even months they get to keep OUR money, interest-free.
This is why we need single payer, Medicare For All. The profit motive is incompatible with providing healthcare to people when and as they need it. Every dollar that goes to obscene CEO salaries and shareholder dividends is a dollar that SHOULD have gone toward keeping (or making) someone healthy and whole, but didn’t.
OH my word, this is nearly identical to the problems and frustrations we had with our exchange plann ALL LAST YEAR. I spent the equivalent of a part time job, every week, trying to straighten out messes made by either the insurance company or the exchange, and including my doctors suddenly no longer accepting my insurance midway thru the year when you can’t change plans because some dumb bureaucrat or insurance lobbyist decided it was a good idea to only allow enrollment once a year. Then this year we had to pick a new plan anyway because the useless plan we had was no longer offered. Like you, we had to switch to an HMO (for the same price as our former PPO). I keep getting notices in the mail, email, by phone telling me I have no insurance because for some reason they are unaware of us having signed up with a new plan. We submitted our application Dec 14th and have yet to receive any insurance cards. If I want to save money on Rxs, I have to get my drugs from my insurance Co thru the mail. If you know Florida USPS, you know how risky this can be. You may never see those mail-order drugs. And why are drugs cheaper if purchased from my insurer instead of the local pharmacy? And to boot, I am still wrangling with old bills under the old insurance because it takes them 90 days to process claims so any bills from Nov and Dec will carry over in headaches to this year. And they wonder why so many people are just happier to pay the fine and go another route?
OMG, you’re up and around and back!! I miss you so much!!!!
Laffy! So good to see you too 🙂
SO much has gone on since last time I was on Twitter. I may return, I may not. It looks ugly with this election & I’m trying to reduce stress following last year’s adventures with hospitalization.
It’s so good to see you here. I had no idea you were going through this. My show today will be all about this insanity. I hope you don’t mind if I read what you posted here!
Don’t mind at all.
You’ll be interested to know that my husband who has pancreatic cancer and Medicare didn’t have to endure any of these headaches. Medicare & his supplement (for which he pays about $300/mo total) took care of everything. We need Medicare for ALL!
You’re wise to steer clear of the insanity on the Twitterz, Barky. Omg, your husband. You’ve had the roughest couple of years! Just do whatever it takes to relax a little and know you’re loved. Say hi to your daughter! Hope she gave you my message. xo
We also had the simultaneous 2-policies problem you did because they messed up our subsidy calculation, saying we didn’t verify our income when we had, taking away the subsidy at first, and then reinstating it but when they did so, they did it as a new application for insurance. So for several months, we were arguing with them over cancelling 1 or the other of the 2 plans because everywhere we went for care, had trouble submitting claims. If it makes you feel better, I wound up in the hospital for a month from all the stress; 8 days in a hospital induced coma, 2 weeks in ICU, and 10 days in physical rehab (hey, I was going.to get my money’s worth for all that stress AND make them pay!).