Anthem Bureaucracy

My previous post explained a very frustrating and frankly scary situation my wife experienced with our health insurance carrier, Anthem. I composed an email and promptly sent it off to the CEO of Anthem and their investor relations contacts listed on their corporate web site.

Well, Anthem tried...I guess. Monday morning I received a call from some assistant to the CEO of Anthem. She had a very concerned tone and seemed to want to help rectify the situation. She asked me some questions about the situation and then told me she was looking into the situation further and she would get back with me.

From there it just gets worse. I received another call later that morning from what was obviously some customer service rep who had no more authority than to read from a script and try to explain to me that what happened is policy. What a joke. I re-explained to this lady, who obviously had no real knowledge of what had happened to my wife, what happened and why what she was telling me put my wife in a potentially dangerous situation and the down side of all of this to Anthem. Basically I told her that her answers were bogus and Anthem should be ashamed of themselves.

She then changed her potential solution and said that the prescription the doctor gave my wife required another authorization from the doctor, and if she could get the doctor to fill out another form then I might get my money back and Anthem would cover the script. I asked her why the doctor's script was not enough "authorization" for the medicine to be covered. She offered no answer other than that was their policy for that medicine ans she then blamed our doctor for not filling out this form promptly close to a week after the fact.
Question: Why is it the responsibility of the doctor to fill out form after form because Anthem is too cheap to fulfill the commitment set forth by the insurance policy that we pay for week after week??
Answer: They are heavy on bureaucracy and light on customer service - if you even want to call it that - really they are light on ethical practices and are flirting with disaster by undermining qualified medical professionals and how their care is administered to patients.

I won't waste any more of my time writing to Anthem or about Anthem. They had their chance to make it right and turn a critic into a fan but they failed. Hats off to their bureaucracy and another lost family of customers. As I said in my last post - at our first chance we will drop them as our health care provider and take our business and weekly premiums elsewhere.

Way to go Anthem/Wellpoint!!