It’s 8:00 AM and I need to have a critical question answered regarding my health insurance that I receive through the health connector, aka “Obamacare”, aka, The Affordable Care Act.
I dial the 1-800 number and hear a recorded message, as I expected.
Hello, thank you for calling the health connector. For English, press #1. Para espanol, marque el numero dos.
I press #1
If you are calling about applying for new coverage, press #1. If you are calling about payment issues, press #2. If you are calling regarding questions about your policy, press #3.
I press #3.
You have reached the Health Connector customer service line. Please note that all calls are recorded, for training purposes. Please know that many of the answers to most questions can be found on our website at WWW. blah blah blah
If the policy holder is over 65, press #1, if the policy holder is under 65, Press #2.
I press #2.
Please enter the zip code of the policy holder:
I enter my zip code.
Thank you, you are now being transferred to our service department.
Sound of phone ringing, new recording starts.
You have reached the customer service department. We are experiencing high call volume at this time. Please call back later.
The line goes dead.
I call again in 30 minutes.
Same outcome.
I call every 30 minutes and finally, by 11:00 AM, I reach a real human being and begin the arduous process of trying to figure out what will happen with my policy since my income has recently changed.
I get put on hold for several minutes on several occasions as the person on the other line has to contact other people/departments to find the answer. On the plus side, she is very pleasant, somewhat knowledgeable and apologetic.
By 11:45 AM, the matter is resolved.
Cool story, bro.
What struck me is they don’t even pretend that “you’re call is very important to us.”
This exchange, as frustrating as I’m sure it was, sounds much more productive than my experiences with, for example, BCBS/MA or any of my health care providers. Have you ever had to deal with the unemployment office? My experience is that ANY interaction with them takes a week.
Sounds to me as though you got the matter resolved within a half day.
I encourage you to count your blessings.
AARP says older people could pay $16,174 more per year for coverage as a result of killing 2 kinds of ObamaCare subsidies which help folks afford their premiums and out-of-pocket costs.
In my dealings with the unemployment office, I had to rely on assistance from a staff member of my state senator three times to resolve issues that were not of my making, simply errors or misunderstanding on their part.
Service (if you could call it that) was better than my previous experiences with any ISP.
One problem on all fronts, clearly, is insufficient personnel and/or personnel who are probably paid substandard wages and receiving little, if any, training. But since ‘these people” are not college graduates, we pay them crap wages and treat them poorly. As the saying goes, if all you are paying is bananas, don’t complain about the monkeys.
Elevate these people to higher wages, a measure of dignity, a scene of purpose and my guess is that things would improve, but then we might not be able to pay college grad professional twice as much.
Epilogue: Yesterday we received seven letters from the health connector and associated parties. Four informed us that we were at rick of losing our coverage. Three informed us that our coverage was intact.
Yup….and that meant another two hours on the phone to clear things up.
Did I tell you about the time when I received a letter in the mail from the health connector telling me that I was going to lose my coverage because I recently moved? (I had not)
I called and asked them where I had moved to ….and why, if I had moved, did they send a letter to my “old” address? It took a while, but the matter was resolved.