This is really just stupid. Last month, my oldest daughter turned 27. She doesn’t even live in the state and now, she’s too old to be on our insurance. Neither of my daughters live here, so my wife hopped on the insurance website to remove them both. It says on the website that removing beneficiaries will have no effect whatsoever on your coverage.

That’s when the nightmare started.

Right after the first of the month, our doctor called and said that our insurance showed as cancelled. My wife had an appointment and I had pills to pick up. I called and after running through HOURS of bullshit, I talked to someone who said “yup, your coverage got cancelled because you made these changes.” Never mind that the website says specifically that you can do it, their policy is that for any changes, they cancel your coverage and then reinstate it. The process takes 5-7 business days from the time they are informed of it. There are no exceptions.

It’s bullshit, but what can I do? They told me to call back on day 8 and verify that it was fixed. So, my wife reschedules her appointment and I just sit here with no meds because the insurance sucks. The pharmacy refuses to even sell them to me at full price. No insurance, no pills.

So I wait the 8 business days and call  back, only to find out that they have done absolutely nothing. They just sat there with their collective thumbs up their asses. I demanded to be transferred to the escalation department. The guy there looks at it, says that there is no reason it should have been cancelled and says “it’ll take 3 days.”

Oh hell no. It’s already been 8. Fix it now. Then he says that he can send it to the reinstatement department with a rush and it can be done in 4 business hours. Great. Do that! He guaranteed it would be done and then I called my pharmacy, told them to run the insurance in the morning and I’ll stop by to pick up my pills.

The next morning, they call me and say it’s still not working. Back to the phones. After I get hung up on once or twice, which happens all the time, after I talk to one person who promises that the escalation department will call me back, which they never do, I get through to some guy who looks at the account and says that whoever it was in reinstatement, they just marked off that it had been done, but nothing had actually been done. Now what? “Oh, that’ll take 3…” Bullshit. Today. Get it fixed today.

So he sends all the information over to the manager of reinstatement or whatever and they aren’t responding. They are apparently the only person on the planet who can do this. So I sit on the phone with this guy for over an hour while he works and finally he says he’ll just call me back when he hears something.

Sure, I’ve heard that  before. However, without any choice, I agree. He does promise after all. It’s now been over an hour just sitting here waiting for his call. Not sure how long I should wait before going through the process all over again.

I want to complain but they make it impossible to talk to a real person. You can send them an e-mail, which they will invariably ignore. I even asked this second guy to transfer me to someone I can file a complaint with and he says that’s impossible. They don’t answer their phones. He can “file one for me”, but that doesn’t fix any of my problems, does it? I want to talk to a real human being and get some answers. An e-mail is just going to get put in a file somewhere and never actually addressed.A

And, as expected, they didn’t respond to my complaint. They ignored me, as I figured they’d do. The entire problem was on their end and it took me 7 hours of my life, digging through the vile underbelly of the company, to figure out what happened. Their internal pharmacy system, Express Scripts, wasn’t talking to my insurance account. My account was fine. Their system was screwed up. Everyone was too busy passing the buck and trying to get off the phone that it took me nearly 2 days of harping on it to get it fixed. Why? Because they just don’t care.

Fuck the entire insurance industry. Just fuck them all straight up the ass.