coffeesucker said:
This has got to be one of the most egregious examples of bureaucracy gone bad that I have ever heard. Ever.
Oh that's nothing.
Try dealing with an HMO when you're self employed (not on a group plan) when you've got a spouse with a chronic disease. They'll try every trick in the book to cancel your coverage. The most common ploy was to raise the premium by 20 cents, not mail a premium notice, then try to cancel us for not paying the entire premium. I don't know how many times we had to hire a courier to deliver a dollar to Oxfords Chicago office to make a deadline. Those guys would laugh at us over the phone when they thought they'd pranged us. Every time we paid a premium one of us would have to spend an hour on the phone tracking down someone who could tell us exactly what our premium was down to the penny before we'd send payment. They got wise to that and started raising the rates by a few cents the day before payment was due, so then we had to have someone fax us a signed premium quote before every payment.
At one point they discovered our fax was down and that my wife was paying a local copy center $1 a page to receive their fax, so they faxed her an 80 page document along with the quote. They thought that was really funny. Whoops! Ha ha ha!
We're going through the same thing now to get COBRA coverage so we don't have a 63 day insurance gap (after which time they can prang us for 'pre-existing condition'). Unicare has 'never received' six checks we've sent to them over the past month. Yesterday we had a friend in Chicago hand deliver 8 $100 bills to them with a private investigator witnessing and photographing the transaction. I'm sure they've got a team of experts working on a way to get around that one. Hopefully my wife will be able to finally refill her meds this week.