I went to get a prescription refilled for my son today. I didn’t get it filled because of the Insurance Company — Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama. They have him listed as a her and wouldn’t fill the prescription. (There are further complications but that’s the gist of it.) I called customer service, which, if you aren’t angry before calling by the time you get through the voice message menu selection tree, you are by the time you can actually speak to a human. The customer service rep was friendly and told me that they had updated their error. He also explained that it would not be updated in the computer until tomorrow so he gave me a number to have the pharmacist call to have them override the error. The pharmacist was helpful, the BC/BS pharmacy help line was not. The folks at Blue Cross refused to do what their customer service rep told me they would and would not even discuss it but kept trying to get off the phone before the pharmacist could explain the situation. She wouldn’t speak to me, she doesn’t talk to cardholders.
Reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live skit with Lily Tomlin playing Ernestine the operator doing a commercial for the phone company, the slogan was ‘We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.’
So BCBS is still using batch processing, huh?
In other news, I’m thinking of setting up an automated IVR to answer my home phone, which gets nothing but marketing & donation calls, to use voice recognition to keep the caller in an infinte loop that sounds like a person talking back to them. They will eventually hang up and, every now and then, I’ll take a look at the log and grin.
And in the meantime, your boy has medical needs that go unmet. Bummer. I hope he’s ok. Praying for you all. As for that answering thing mentioned above…sign me up.