Disagree strongly. It is bunk. Every time you change jobs, or your employer changes HR companies, or the company changes insurance companies, or the insurance company changes what plans are available, your entire family has months of uncertainty. Uncertainty about whether they’ll be able to get the health care that they need, whether they’ll have to switch doctors (again), whether there will even be a doctor available in the new plan’s ‘network’, whether the new plan will pay for their medication or force them to switch to something less effective. And one mistake made anywhere by any one of the middlemen involved (employer, HR company, insurance company, network, health administration company) means that you spend a year without the health care that you need (and that a doctor doesn’t get business that they need).
Why? The only apparent reason to the consumer is so that some administrators somewhere can shuffle papers around to feel important and some executives can raise prices again so that they can buy a new mercedes. It doesn’t help consumers or medical professionals in any apparent way and only causes problems.
Below is just rant.
My latest experience: my daughter was told by her doctor that the insurance company had refused to pay for her last appointment because the birthdate on record didn’t match. She called the insurance company and they put that one claim through but said that any future claims for the rest of the year would be rejected unless the HR company fixed their records as well, and that any previous claims this year had probably also been rejected so there might be bills on the way. Went to fix it at the HR company but their website was closed for 3 days. (Yes, their website was closed because it was after business hours on a Friday!) It appears to be fixed now (although no one has confirmed that yet) but any bills will have to be bounced back to the medics to resubmit to insurance. None of that is helpful to us, the doctors, the insurance company, or the HR company. It’s just nonsense that does no good for anyone involved.
Before that, on a different plan, it was finding out (after open enrollment closed) that there was only one doctor (of a particular type) in the entire state that accepted that plan’s insurance and my daughter was stuck with that doctor (who was overloaded and rarely had appointments available) for a year no matter what. Of course, they hadn’t included that important bit of info in the open enrollment brochure.
