“Hellth” insurance
Random thought for the day: What kind of health insurance do doctors have?
The last two weeks were the open enrollment period for everything that has to do with insurance at my company. It was heavily stressed that we MUST enroll by November 16. In typical indecisive fashion, I put off doing some research on the four health plan options until the latter part of the period during which we MUST enroll. (Really? Is someone’s head going to roll if we don’t?) The last day rolls around, and I still haven’t decided. There is nothing on our literature giving an exact cutoff time on the 16th, so I asked our HR and was told I could enroll online until midnight. There was no specification of time zone, so my assumption was local time. All our literature says we can call the help center from 9-5 LOCAL time, so there was no reason for me to deduce this could be otherwise.
At 10:40 pm, while I’m in the middle of using the online tools, I find I’ve been logged out again due to inactivity on the main site. (They have an annoyingly short inactivity logout time, and to top it off, you can’t even create your own username to log in with. Every time you have to input an alphanumeric code they assigned.) I log back in, and the tools are gone. The enrollment stuff is gone. I’ve officially not enrolled in anything, will have no health insurance of any kind come January 1, 2008.
Well, there’s nothing I can do about it over the weekend, so on Monday I call the company that is our new benefits administrator and explain what happened. I’m told the web site should have shut down at 12 am Eastern time, 9 pm local time. If they let it go until 10:30, they might as well have thrown in the last hour and a half! She puts me on hold and comes back to tell me she can’t do anything. What? The customer service people can’t enroll me over the phone despite the innocent snafu?
No. I must fill out a FORMAL APPEAL explaining why I missed the enrollment window, which will then be sent to the insurance gods at Omnicom, apparently.
Ridiculous.