The Affordable Healthcare Act Blues

With nearly two years to get it right, the government and the insurance companies still managed to screw up the ACA roll-out. We’re all familiar with the long-running soap opera of the government health care exchange web site. Out of the gate, it ran about as well as a mule in the Kentucky Derby. Too bad Obama didn’t hire the same people who developed his campaign web site. Somehow that site managed to run well enough to pump tens of millions of dollars from on-line donors into his campaign coffers. Had the ACA web designers done the campaign web site, Obama probably wouldn’t have raised enough to run an ad on Patch. 

We’ve grown accustomed to government projects being over budget and overdue. But the insurance companies aren’t exactly models of efficiency either. If the large company I deal with is typical of the lot, we can expect the confusion and idiocy to continue a lot longer. Regardless of where the fault lies, the consumer, as usual, bears the brunt of the pain. Unless the pursuit of health insurance ranks up there with life, liberty, and happiness, my guess is that most people are fed up with the whole mess. 

My tale is just one of many in the seemingly unending tales of woe. I received notification by snail mail and email in early October that they would be cancelling my current policy since it did not meet the minimal criteria of the ACA. That’s certainly true, but the ACA also subjected policies to rate increase reviews, so there was additional incentive for the insurance companies to dump the individual policies and come up with something new. I was also informed that I needed to enroll in a new ACA compliant health insurance plan by December 23rd, if I did not want coverage to lapse by the first of the year. So I started the enrollment process through the health exchange web site in early December, forewarned to be prepared for outages, delays, and frustration. Expecting the worst, I made it through after two evenings without as many scars as I expected. Being forced to save the application input at each step of the process was tedious, but given the glass jaw nature of the web site, I suppose it was for the best. 

However, fueled by critics of Obamacare, the public furor over not being able to keep your current health care plan as Obama had promised forced the government to change the rules. The premium for my plan was going up over a hundred dollars a month and I was getting a comparable plan through the exchange for much less. So being forced to get rid of the old plan was actually a blessing in disguise for me. I had no intention of keeping my old plan. 

Under the new rules, my insurance company sent out a letter and email stating that I could keep my old plan, but if I had already enrolled in a new plan, which I had, my old policy would be cancelled and the new one would go into effect in 2014. If I wanted to keep the old plan instead, I would have to contact them. Otherwise, there was nothing else I had to do. That sounds reasonable I thought. However, when have insurance companies ever done the reasonable thing? Their entire strategy is to wear people down through complicated procedures, mountains of paperwork, and endless communiques with baffling requests for more unnecessary information.  Insurance companies believe that their customers have countless hours to devote to insurance matters. So doing nothing seemed to be an obvious ploy. 

Being skeptical, I called before year end to make sure the old policy was cancelled. I had expected that this company would have geared up for the expected call volume. However, neither the phone system nor the people hiding behind the maze of garbled messages were up to the task. On the first call I was transferred to some automated system that tried to sell me membership in a buying club. When I called back I went through an automated rapid-fire session in which each question was interrupted by the next question and I was never given an opportunity to answer any of them. Between groups of messages, disjointed fragments of raucous music played. Forget waterboarding. The CIA should have just forced prisoners to talk to insurance companies. 

After what seemed like forever, I was finally connected to someone in customer service. This person assured me that my old policy was cancelled, the new one was in effect, any refunds from the old policy would be applied to premiums for the new policy, and that automatic payment for the new policy was set up. But in the world of insurance, things are never quite what they seem. 

Although my email stated that my old policy would be automatically cancelled and I was assured by the customer service rep that it was cancelled, that didn’t happen. I didn’t discover this until the insurance company took out the new, larger premium for the old policy from our bank account in January. Premium collection is the only part of the business they seem to have working. Even when it’s not supposed to be working. 

When I called to get the problem corrected, I was told that the customer service rep I talked to earlier was not knowledgeable enough to do any of the stuff he said he was going to do. Only in the world of insurance is something like this considered an acceptable answer. They would not be able to put back the funds they withdrew. Instead I would have to wait ten days for a paper check. They would be also withdrawing the premium for the new policy in the interim. Continuing to seek a level of incompetence unrivaled by any government agency, they then began placing robocalls asking me if I want to cancel my old policy and add the new policy. However, I couldn’t respond to the robocalls. I finally had to call back the number these calls were coming from and then confirm the cancellation. 

I have now cancelled this policy, which was supposed to be cancelled automatically, three times. It is harder to kill than a vampire. At this point, I still don’t know if it’s dead. I can’t log into my account at the insurance company to find out either, because as has been the case for most of the last month, the site is unavailable. And I’m afraid to talk to anyone else in customer service for fear that I will once again deal with someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing and I’ll wind up with even more policies and more automatic withdrawals and eventually be forced into bankruptcy just trying to get one lousy health insurance policy. 

The truly sad part about all of this is that we haven’t even begun to reform health care in America and all evidence points to the impossibility of ever achieving that goal.