United, more.

Yep. I am seriously going to consider shopping around for insurance... I currently carry United, and now I'm wondering: why am I paying these people $600 a month?

• They are living proof of why we need a public plan. Why can the government afford to pay us more than they do?
• They denied a claim of Willa's because her problem occurred within 6 months of buying the policy. Too bad for her. She should've waited to get sick!
• They refuse to realize that we do not participate in their capitated plan: which means I have a small pile of rejected claims. Each of these takes approximately 20 minutes on the phone. I've spoken to the provider representative at least twice, and called about each mis-calculated claim to the claims department.
• See my previous insurance rant.
• Now I've been on the phone for 20 minutes for an $88 claim that was rejected because, supposedly, the member's plan "does not cover this visit, consultation, evaluation and management." I was able to find the member online on United's website (which is actually, surprisingly, quite good.) and find that her coverage is 100%. But, I couldn't find her claim status anywhere. So I reluctantly picked up the phone. The phone number on the top of the EOB was, I find out after sifting through the voice response system, only for customers. I was connected to the provider number and got a very nice young man who could, after awhile, finally pull up my patient. But he couldn't find any claims matching the one that we have that was rejected. He looked and looked -- we used every number on the EOB that could conceivably be used to retrieve a patient's records. Nothing. He put me on hold. He looked some more. Finally he decided to transfer me to a "claims specialist" who he was sure would be able to resolve the problem. I sat on hold for about 2 minutes, and then -- I was disconnected.

Ooooof. So now what do I do? Is it worth $88 to start all over again? Do they want me to just forget it, and maybe bill the patient?

Let me state here that every single person I've talked to at United Healthcare has been very nice. I have nothing against them personally. But they need to do something about this mess they call "healthcare."