I’m getting phone calls from my health insurance company, first from a “registered nurse” with no information in the voicemail other than a call-back number (seems like it could be a scam, but I need to verify the number, so far people are saying the number is legit), and now I have a second phone call where the voicemail mentions they are calling from the insurance company’s “concierge program”.
Mostly I want to know if I can ignore these calls without consequence, or if I have to return them, and if so what should I expect?
Reading this question and these comments, the US healthcare system must be so fucking exhausting.
“Are these scam calls or will I lose my coverage if I ignore them? I literally can’t tell.”
I hate it so, so much, on a deeply visceral level. I work in biotech, and have worked at a med tech previously that focused on care coordination, and additionally had to fucking force my insurance, hospital, hospital billing department, and HRA provider to get on the phone together and walk them through debugging each other’s bureaucracy to track down the one fucking RefID that some idiot stuck in the wrong box - that last one took fucking WEEKS. So yeah, I know a thing or five about the shitshow that is health insurance in the states, and I’ve been radicalized by my experiences.
Please send more blue shells - it seems that’s the only thing they respond meaningfully to.
As someone that’s spent over a decade working in US healthcare, I can easily say it’s exhausting for everyone involved. It’s busy work. Especially if you are not providing direct care. Everything else is extractive fluff that makes cost of care more expensive, burdensome, and just dumb. And now with VC companies wading into healthcare everything is becoming even more expensive, even more dumb, and greedy.
Yes, I’m always worried about being penalized for not navigating the bureaucracy well enough, or for letting things slip through the cracks.
It’s gotten to the point where you need to have an attorney on retainer just to get real answers from these companies. Instead of saying you’ll get an attorney to the underpaid customer service rep with no power who can’t care less and people threaten legal actions with no follow through constantly… an actual attorney sending a letter calling the company out for their failure to address your issues gets you put into a separate system where they know you actually have representation they want to avoid.
Those monthly retainer services are surprisingly cheap too if you just need something verified or a notice sent once in a while. Many companies even offer discounted legal retainer services as part of their benefits packages.
It really is.