Occasionally I will stray into "user experience" scenarios with respect to internet applications. This is about medical insurance. I'm an IBM retiree. In response to the Obamacare law, IBM has "dropped" medical insurance: it has contracted with an external private exchange for all employees' and retirees' medical insurance. Given that, in order to receive an IBM contribution to the new HRAs, ie receive any health benefit from IBM, we must enroll in an insurance program offered by that private exchange. Since we already have all of our doctors in one hospital system, the insurance programs we can select must also match those accepted by the hospital system. At the time this all happened, there was no overlap between the companies IBM's contracted exchange would accept and the companies our hospital system and doctors would accept. We either had to drop IBMs contribution to the HRA or drop our doctors. Essentially, we were one of the uncounted casualties of Obamacare. Fortunately, we were reprieved late in the year when the hospital system and doctors added Humana. That was one of the insurance companies in the exchange's portfolio.
Humana requires that we use a certain Humana subsidiary for Rx mail orders. You have to separately enroll in that. (You can't enroll until after your insurance takes effect; ie Jan 1) Yesterday, Jan 2, I spent an hour trying to enroll, but it would not accept my information. It acted as if my information was not correct. (Other than the system was really down, the real issue is that I had to have an ID#, which apparently has to be provided by this mail order subsidiary, which requires a phone call to them. (Why don't they use Humana's ID number?) Last night, I called the support number and was on hold from 8pm until 10:30. The battery on my phone was dying and I was too, so I gave up.
I called this morning a little after 8, when they open their support service. I had to wait only 1/2 hour before I got a real person. She told me their systems have been down. (And they had been down... so much for my effort to enroll on line.) She couldn't say when they would be up. Furthermore, she said the systems were not stable and were likely to go down again. Would I like to make an appointment for a call back? I said yes, and asked what times would be available. She said they only schedule for a 24-48 hour period, not a time... Huh? That's because they can't predict when the system will be up.
She offered to take some down some pre-enrollment information and started the process. She asked for medical conditions for which I was being treated. I gave them. Then she asked if I had any medical conditions I had that I was not aware of. Huh?
So now I have to hope I am near a phone when I am called, sometime in the next 48 hours. (Hint: if you have VOIP service, that service often comes with an option to reroute your phone calls to your cell phone when the VOIP service is down. So, if you are going to be away from your home phone, pull the plug on your VOIP service and the phone call will go to your cell phone.)
I would welcome comments on your unusual experiences with health insurance web sites. Enter them as comments below.
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