You pay for insurance to help pay for healthcare, which includes your prescription medications. So, what happens when they stop covering those expenses?
That’s exactly what 85-year-old Juanita Freeman’s was surely asking when it looked like Cigna might try to pull a fast one. Like many senior citizens, her medicine cabinet is full of prescriptions she must routinely take. The medications were covered seamlessly for years – until this past year, when she realized that Cigna hadn’t reimbursed her upwards of $2,000. So, now insurers are denying seniors their much-needed prescriptions? Color us shocked.
Her story, reported and investigated by Fox 4 Kansas City, did reach a solution. The cost was finally covered, but took months of back and forth – a substantial burden Cigna forced their customer to bear.
Anyone who’s had to call their insurance company is probably having flashbacks just thinking about it – the automated robots, the hold music, the bouncing back and forth, no one giving you a straight answer… it’s a living nightmare, especially when your health hangs in the balance.
We’ve let payors get so big, it seems they’ve lost the ability to provide adequate customer service – ya know, good business – to their members, the very same people who pay them tons of money to take care of them.
We know this is also not a one-time issue – as we said, riding the insurer merry-go-round is a sadly common experience. But we have to wonder if part of the run-around is not a bug in the system, but a feature they’ve intentionally designed. When the customer service merry-go-round keeps spinning, how many folks decide to just jump off?
