HMSA Extra Benefits

[ChunksterK]

Update: We took our friend shopping at Walmart last week, and several routinely purchased items that were always covered by her HMSA card in the past were rejected. One of the ladies manning the self checkouts said this has been happening often since the first of the month and cheerfully offered to remove the items from the bill and send them to restock. YMMV, but it sounds like HMSA needs to do a lot of work on this.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Thanks Chunkster.
I’ve recently received another summary of my “grievance” which included:

* a quote, supposedly from me, of something I never said
* they were happy I received the product list, but they never sent it
* even though the scanner feature doesn’t work, sometimes the products scanned (if it worked) will incorrectly show whether they are approved or not.  So… I’m not missing much?

I of course called the number on the letter to speak with the “grievance” handler and:

* she offered to send the product list, again.  She didn’t.  I can only imagine that they are actually pushing “Send” on their keyboard, but then like the scanner it doesn’t work?
* she was happy to inform me that she just received an email the previous day at 5 PM from Medline that they are aware of the scanner problem.  I asked how this was different from the other times they’ve been made aware of the problem over the past year (at least four times by me) but she didn’t know

My doctors are good, and competent, so why is it we need a middleman?  Who can’t even send an email?  Or return a phone call when they’ve repeatedly said they would?  
They do take my money every month.
That works.

[ChunksterK]

Somehow the taking the money part always works. As I said earlier, HMSA is a typical Hawaii bureaucratic quagmire with no consequences for poor performance.