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I work for a large health insurance company. We offer our members a benefit to purchase healthy food. It requires a card being sent out, I handle these calls every single day where people don’t receive the card. Often times the card is not delivered until three weeks after their effective date They receive an allowance on the first of every month, and that allowance will go away if they don’t use the benefits, meaning it doesn’t accumulate if they don’t use it all. Since some of them don’t receive them for a few weeks we have a workflow where we can retro balance their card so they get all the benefits they were supposed to receive while the card was being shipped. Some people don’t receive their cards for several months because the vendor we use is largely unreliable. I just had a member who had started in January and it is June and they haven’t received the card. They actually didn’t know they had a card because they had a hard time reading their plan materials, and I casually mentioned it when they said they were struggling buying food and paying their bills and paying their bills, with the cost of their copays. So in this workflow, we’re supposed to check to see if the card was mailed and then email another department the details and they can make their balance retroactive. Well, this person‘s card was ordered but never sent out, it still said pending mail. So I emailed the department the details explain why his benefits needed to be retroactive. It is usually a largely automated process but they emailed me back and said it wasn’t their fault the member did not receive their card, because the card can be accessed through the app and used that way, and they had multiple plan materials that indicated they had the benefits so they should’ve called earlier. I lost it. My department is working largely with Medicare advantage plans these people are old as shit. They don’t have smart phones, and they don’t know what apps are most of the time. Plus, since they never received the card they most literally couldn’t input it into the digital wallet on the app. I emailed the department back a snarky email and advise them that perhaps they should have more compassion when we’re working with the elderly. I told them to try putting their card on Apple Pay without their fucking card number and let me know how that works. Their only job is to restore the benefit and get the member their card. They act like they are some Lord who gets to govern which members get to receive the benefits THEY PAY FOR. I’m not here for their commentary and neither is the member. I’ll probably get written up for being unprofessional but I cannot stand when we are doing our best to advocate for our customers and the other departments just can’t get on board. It makes our jobs 10 times harder because we have to tell the customers that we’re going to fix their issue, but we have to forward it to a different department who might do some dumb shit like that and never fix it but then our asses are on the line.
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