Not me, but my boss…

My boss is a foreigner with a US Investor’s visa. Even though he lives overseas and uses healthcare in his native country, he is still enrolled on the corporate group insurance plan just in case.

On a recent visit, he realized that he had never received his insurance card, so we checked into it and discovered that there was an error in the address on his policy. And that we couldn't correct it on-line but perhaps by calling customer service.

So we called, and of course because of HIPAA, I couldn't handle the call for him, he had to do it with his thick foreign accent.

The customer service agent immediately switched into condescension mode, assuming that my boss needed childish explanations of the situation, especially the fact that the address can only be changed by a written form sent to the address of record! My boss was floored by this one and tried to point out the fallacy in that “solution” to which the agent replied, “if this is too complicated, perhaps your supervisor can help you”.

At this point we just politely thanked the agent and called our benefits administrator who took care of it. But alas no comeuppance for the condescending agent.

Update: perhaps we were not the only dissatisfied users of our insurer's call center; during the most recent call we learned that the entire operation has been outsourced to a provider in a distant country…