Curmudgeon's Corner

We've established before that I am involved in the health insurance field. I don't sell it but I am a licensed agent. I use it just like the majority of you and I'm frustrated by it. And, I probably understand it better than most who will read this.

My friends joke with me about health insurance companies and I usually make light of their good-natured jibes and then try to defend the industry. I have had, or closely observed, several experiences recently and I simply have to ask again: why does health insurance have to be so frustrating?

Why do health insurance companies make us jump through hoops and then not have the right people at the end of the course to help us? Why, when we've finally followed their rules and navigated the maze, do health insurers live up to their ever more popular reputation as bad corporate citizens? Why, when we finally reach a human in the department we've been forced to work through, are we told that something hasn't been received from our doctor? Or that we have reached the wrong department? Or that we'll have to call back next week when the person with whom we need to speak will have returned to his or her office?

Why is it that health insurance companies consolidate and then get worse as the result? Couldn't they consolidate and keep the better parts of the other company? Seemingly, there is a great rush to the bottom. One health insurer buys another and the acquirer seems to have the uncanny ability to rid itself of everything good it had purchased. This has begun to remind me of lemmings finding their way to the sea in that it is seemingly inevitable. There is one company (which will remain unnamed) that is reported to have lost its ability to bill its clients correctly. According to some agents with whom I talk, this company has even lost the ability to send an invoice at all. Of course, it acquired a functioning company and then proceeded to replace that company's functioning operating system with its own.

I know the game and even I tire of it. How can I expect my friends who don't know the game not to despise the industry of which I am part? How can I explain that pharmacy benefit management companies try to convince doctors to change prescriptions because they get paid to do so by the manufacturer of competing brands? How can I explain that a co-pay can actually cost more than the medicine would've cost without insurance? Insurance companies seem to have evolved to the point that they believe they thrive only when they exhibit a total lack of good judgment and any semblance of common sense.

How can we in the industry expect people to want our product and service when our product and service is so poor? How can we expect employers to continue to put up with insurers that are unable even to generate a correct monthly bill?

We may understand that higher insurance premiums are caused by higher health care costs...but when the insurer performs as poorly as most seem to do, we feel justified in blaming them for the woes of the whole health care industry.

Until health insurance companies begin to show we insured people that they care about us and not just about their profitability, they have no right to expect to be thought of benevolently! Until health insurers begin to deliver on their promises without resorting to tactics designed to evade paying claims, they have no right to expect us to think of them as anything but necessary evils.

Especially as fewer and fewer options remain available to us consumers, health insurers must get their acts together or we'll all be faced with the "solution that isn't"...single payer health care run by a government bureaucracy.

And if that comes to pass, we consumers will come to understand that, even as bad as they were, health insurers were no where near as bad as the replacement. We consumers will find ourselves hankering for the "good old days"...but they'll be nowhere to be found.

Health insurers...please get your acts together and begin to once again deliver what you promise and do so with compassion, caring and understanding! At least act as though you care. Is that too much to ask?