Please Hold

Calling a medical or dental insurance company is the closest thing modern adults have to running an ultramarathon. It tests your endurance, your sanity, your lung capacity and your will to live. If Dante were writing The Inferno today, he’d add a tenth circle of hell: being stuck on hold with your insurer while a recording tells you your call is “very important” for the 43rd consecutive minute.

You know you’re in trouble the moment you dial. The automated menu has roughly the same complexity as filing international taxes. “Press 1 if you have a question about your benefits. Press 2 if you have a question about a claim. Press 3 if you recently lost hope.” By the time you reach an actual human being, usually around the point your phone battery is at 13%, you feel like you’ve successfully completed an escape room designed by Satan.

And then the fun really begins.

You ask your simple, reasonable question, such as: “Why did you deny the claim for a procedure you pre-approved?”

The representative responds with something like: “Well, according to the Explanation of Coverage, subsection 14, paragraph C, footnote 7 of your policy CLEARY states that you are responsible for the non-allowable coinsurance adjustment in relation to the excluded alternate code.”

Ah, of course. Silly you. You should have known that asking for clarity would cause the agent to speak in Parseltongue. For every question you ask, they respond with five more. It’s like a deranged game of bureaucratic Whac-A-Mole.

You: “So is this covered?”

Them: “Well, that depends. Did your provider submit the pre-treatment estimate, the post-treatment estimate, the dual-treatment consideration form and the form confirming you are, in fact, alive?”

You: “Yes?”

Them: “Great. Now, did they submit them in the correct order, at the correct time, using the correct version of the form, on a day when Mercury was not in retrograde?”

After 20 minutes of this, you start to suspect the goal isn’t actually to help you. The goal is to wear you down until you agree that paying $640 out of pocket for a routine cleaning is “actually quite reasonable.”

But you aren’t defeated yet. Oh no. You have one final weapon: asking for a supervisor.

This is where the plot twists.

There is never a supervisor available. According to the laws of the insurance universe, all supervisors are permanently in meetings, on lunch, on vacation, on sabbatical, or have mysteriously vanished into the ether.

But don’t worry, they’ll “have a supervisor call you back within 24 to 48 hours.”

Little secret: No, they won’t.

You wait. You refresh your call log. You stare at your phone trying to will it into ringing. Nothing. Days pass. Seasons change. Civilizations rise and fall. Still no call.

So you call back to complain about not being called back… only to start the entire nightmare over from scratch, as if your previous calls were erased by some sort of insurance-company memory-wiping device.

At this point, you completely understand why people take out a hit (er, ignore that), I mean insurance on their insurance.

But you keep going, because while the system may be designed to exhaust you into surrender, you are fueled by principle, frustration and the $47 they owe you and will reimburse even if it destroys you.

And honestly? It probably will.

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Thanks for reading!

--Frosty