Perhaps you read my post a few weeks back wherein my health insurance provider intended to DOUBLE my monthly premium because of a serious and chronic condition…which I don’t have. And the only way that I could get my premium adjusted back down was to have my medical records, and a letter from my doctor, sent to the underwriters for their review. No promises, of course. But they’d review it. Again. Of course, it was their initial review that had determined that I have a serious and chronic condition in the first place.
Because they are, apparently, morons.
Hopefully, you’ve never had to get a copy of your medical records. They’re yours, and yours for the asking, but in this day and age of HMOs and PPOs and feedlot-style health care providers, you have to find just the right department and pay a small processing fee in order to get them. To obtain a letter written by your doctor should be easier, if he or she has the time, but in my case the doctor in question is a colleague of my usual GP, who was on vacation the day of my visit, and so I was bounced around from office to office until someone figured out who needed to write exactly what on my behalf and then where to send it.
By the time I made all of the phone calls and got all of the paperwork, I’d also applied and been approved for health insurance from a different company. Yay!
Today, I called my “old” provider and requested that my insurance be cancelled, effective immediately. When asked why, I explained that I didn’t like having to jump through all of these hoops to prove that I didn’t have the chronic condition they were accusing me of. The rep apologized, and then informed me that I can’t cancel over the phone. I have to fill out a form. A-ha! More hoops! To speed things up, he can email me the form. Well, that’s a relief! Also, I confirmed that I can return the form via email as well, although the rep seemed astonished that not only do I not personally have a fax machine, but I also haven’t worked in any office with a fax machine in a number of years. Because this isn’t 2001.
A couple of hours later, I received the email. It contained not the form in question, but an attached HTML document which I was instructed to download and open. I did, and was directed to a secure Web page that required me to create a password- and secret-phrase-protected account which I then had to sign in to in order to get to the page where I could finally download the Disenrollment Form. The Disenrollment (is that even a word?) Form which contains precisely zero personal information. Not an address, not a member number. Not even my name. And therefore, requires precisely zero security.
It’s as though they’re BEGGING me to leave.
shoes and pie 