Sent today to stateofnh@anthem.com --I am in receipt of your letter, dated December 20, 2007, postmarked December 28, 2007 and received by me today. Your letter indicatesthat Anthem looks forward to serving me and my family, but then goes on to say that you can't serve my family until I provide a list ofprimary care providers (PCPs) for each of us because "[u]nfortunately, Cigna Healthcare did not provide the requested information."
The biannual ritual of switching between Cigna and Anthem is reallybeginning to get on my nerves. It appears that every biennium, Cigna and Anthem submit proposals to serve as administrator of NewHampshire's self-insurance fund for state employees, whereupon the non-incumbent figures out how to outbid the incumbent and the contract changes hands. Every two years the ritual begins with some effervescent communication from the winner promising that the transition from the loser to the winner will be seamless. And every two years the transition is anything but seamless. Your letter -- andthe fact that you dated it eight days prior to the date you bothered to mail it -- is the latest evidence of this dismal reality.
While it is likely that most families subject to this dreary regime incur only minor inconvenience as the result, for me and my family this causes a major disruption. My daughter is a cystic fibrosis patient. She makes lots of claims. And, even though my insurance is not the primary coverage as to my daughter, what will now happen the next time one of my daughter's caregivers seeks reimbursement from mywife's plan is that the other plan will deny coverage because it can no longer confirm whether my daughter is covered under any other health plan. This is true even though, under the standard industry practice for coordination of benefits, my wife's plan is ALWAYS the primary one for our children (because her birthday happens to comeearlier in the year than mine does).
In this instance, it now happens that both my plan and my wife's are with Anthem -- but, frankly, if that makes the transition any more smooth or logical, you'll be receiving a claim from my cardiologist and my orthopedist because Iwill have a heart attack and fall out of my chair.
As to the requested information about my family's PCPs, I don't getwhy it is my responsibility to provide you with this information before you can do your job. Presumably Cigna is contractually obliged to provide you with this information as a part of the transition process. So, the fact that you opt to make this my problem rather than theirs is simply another example of a insurance company taking advantage of its ability to cajole its insureds unconscionably bythreatening to withhold coverage it is obliged to provide.
Your letter demands that I provide not only the name of our family's PCPs but also their addresses, phone numbers and Anthem PCP numbers.I'm happy to provide their names and their institutional affiliations, because this data is readily available to me. Someone you actually pay to do work, as oppose to attempt to intimidate into doing freework, can dig up the rest of the information.
Here is the list:
[redacted]
Issue my cards immediately, please. By "issue" and "immediately" I mean: cause the cards to be printed AND MAILED today. Do your job. The taxpayers of New Hampshire are paying you far too much money for your thus-far mediocre services.
Sincerely,
Rose's and Felix's Dad
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