Filed Under: Crazy Shit My Insurance Provider Does

My employer recently changed our insurance plans around because we’re big enough now to manage our own insurance rather than use a third party co-employer. We actually have nearly identical plans with the same provider, Blue Shield of California. A limitation with their website requires me to register a new account to use with the new insurance plan. The stabby part of that is usernames are based on e-mail addresses. I have to use a different e-mail address which is annoying but at least they support the Gmail plus sign trick.

I’ve been getting e-mails that claims are ready for me to view on the site. When I log in, there are no claims. I finally sent a quick support request to the BSCA website technical team mentioning the creation of a second account and that I haven’t seen any claims come through yet.

Several days pass.

I was about to call the customer service team and then I see this come into my e-mail box. At first glance it looks like a shitty spam.

I decide to click on it.

A fax over e-mail? I understand I can have a fax number tied to an e-mail account but in this case it looks like it was “faxed” directly to my e-mail address.

It gets better.

Somehow my insurance company doesn’t even have my phone number. I get how that could happen – maybe the data export from my employer missed it. But then how about e-mailing me back?

Instead of e-mailing me someone took the time to print out a letter, scan it, and then send it to me via a fax system. Notice how the letter states “Please do not reply to this email” since the responses aren’t monitored. 🤔

Looking at the second page it gets even more hilarious.

There’s my original request as an e-mail.

You really have to wonder what sort of screwed up business processes had to misfire in order for this to be the most efficient way to get in touch with me.