Blue Cross speeds up its customer service for one week
Nobody looks forward to calling their health insurance company with a question, complaint, or claims adjustment request. But if you had to contact Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts this week, the experience might have been more pleasant than usual.
Because Blue Cross knew people who called its member services lines from Oct. 15 to 19 would be surveyed by an outside company to gauge their level of satisfaction, the Boston-based insurer prepared a special script for customer service representatives to follow this week only.
Tasks that normally can take 10 to 30 days to complete — such as correcting mistakes on an insurance bill, or sending members a chart detailing their deductions under flexible spending plans — this week would be addressed the same day the requests were made.
The script given to customer service representatives read in part, “I will work on this today for you as a priority. I will also have a team member call you back later today to let you know the action we have taken to finalize this claim for you,” according to a copy obtained by the Globe.
Twisting the Facts About Health Care
The outcome of the presidential election will determine which of two opposing paths the nation will follow on health care for all Americans. If voters re-elect President Obama, he will protect the health care reforms that are his signature domestic achievement. If they elect Mitt Romney, they will be choosing a man who has pledged to repeal the reform law and replace it with — who knows what?
The competing visions are often difficult to evaluate because the Republican candidates — Mr. Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan — have become so artful about obfuscating their plans for Medicare, Medicaid and what they will do to reform the whole system. Almost nothing the Republican candidates say on these or other health care issues can be taken at face value.
Here are some of their bigger evasions:
REPLACING OBAMACARE
Although Mr. Romney has said he wants to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, he has provided few details on what he would replace it with. When challenged to do so at the first presidential debate, Mr. Romney never quite answered and made some egregious misstatements along the way, some of which were repeated by Mr. Ryan in the vice-presidential debate.
Mr. Romney asserted that his plans had already been laid out in “a lengthy description,” implying that anyone could read the whole story by turning to his campaign Web site. As it turns out, the site has a page-and-a-half statement that says he would rely on private markets and state leadership but gives no hint of what it would cost or who would pay. A one-page list of frequently asked questions about his Medicare plan assures us that “Mitt continues to work on refining the details.”
The Opiate of Exceptionalism
By SCOTT SHANE
Washington
IMAGINE a presidential candidate who spoke with blunt honesty about American problems, dwelling on measures by which the United States lags its economic peers.
What might this mythical candidate talk about on the stump? He might vow to turn around the dismal statistics on child poverty, declaring it an outrage that of the 35 most economically advanced countries, the United States ranks 34th, edging out only Romania. He might take on educational achievement, noting that this country comes in only28th in the percentage of 4-year-olds enrolled in preschool, and at the other end of the scale, 14th in the percentage of 25-to-34-year-olds with a higher education. He might hammer on infant mortality, where the United States ranks worse than 48 other countries and territories, or point out that, contrary to fervent popular belief, the United States trails most of Europe, Australia and Canada in social mobility.
The candidate might try to stir up his audience by flipping a familiar campaign trope: America is indeed No. 1, he might declare — in locking its citizens up, with an incarceration rate far higher than that of the likes of Russia, Cuba, Iran or China; in obesity, easily outweighing second-place Mexico and with nearly 10 times the rate of Japan; in energy useper person, with double the consumption of prosperous Germany.
How far would this truth-telling candidate get? Nowhere fast. Such a candidate is, in fact, all but unimaginable in our political culture. Of their serious presidential candidates, and even of their presidents, Americans demand constant reassurance that their country, their achievements and their values are extraordinary.
Candidates and presidents generally oblige them, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included. It is permissible, in the political major leagues, for candidates to talk about big national problems — but only if they promise solutions in the next sentence: Unemployment is too high, so I will create millions of jobs. It is impermissible to dwell on chronic, painful problems, or on statistics that challenge the notion that the United States leads the world — a point made memorably in a tirade by the dyspeptic anchorman played by Jeff Daniels in the HBO drama “The Newsroom.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/sunday-review/candidates-and-the-truth-about-america.html?pagewanted=print
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