Old Americans are now in that irritating time of the year when they have to waste a lot of time and energy on making sure they have some sort of health care coverage for the impending year.
I am satisfied with the choices I made last year so in theory I can stay out of the annual frenzy and let everything just renew.
But my satisfaction with last year’s choices has one flaw: the cost.
What had started to be expensive but acceptable at the beginning of 2015 became substantially more expensive in April when Medigap bumped up – I was already committed to that plan for the balance of the year - and startlingly more so on pharmacy coverage with September’s announcement of a 25% increase on my Part D supplement for 2016.
Presumably Medigap would bump again in April 2017, this being America.
So when I heard that the exchange that I am required to use if I want to be reimbursed out of my HRA had a better deal for Medigap, I thought it might be good to look into it.
I decided that with great irritation.
The irritation set in because “looking into it” would require that I try to find something on the user unfriendly web site provided by One Exchange, a Towers Watson Company.
As a retiree of IBM I am required to avail myself of the privilege of using One Exchange if I want to get any money back from IBM’s HRA.
That HRA was IBM’s desperation attempt to provide to its retirees some degree of realization of the various increasingly desirable health care benefits the company had committed to in the glory years.
Negativity aside, I thank them for the vestiges.
I just wish they had provided an IBM quality/class way of availing myself of the vestiges.
But back to the story:
My irritation was further stoked by my near certainty that there would be no way to find out what I wanted to find out on the web site, so I knew that I would need to go to the next step, that of calling One Exchange and hoping to call on a day when somebody other than the talking machine was there so I could avail myself of the service that they laughably call “talk to an expert”.
This morning I was pleased that the talking machine expeditiously turned me over to the services of “an expert”.
I had entered various things about me during my time with the talking machine so I knew that they should know all that they might need to know to service whatever it might be that I had had the temerity to call about.
But I knew that they always like to see if callers had lied to the talking machine.
So I answered all her questions.
Then I asked my question.
“I have heard that One Exchange offers – specifics excluded to preclude mutual terminally fatal boredom .”
Imagine if you will that you had called your health exchange but had actually been connected to the IRS.
You know, the IRS that can answer any tax question by having very nice but totally inexpert people go through various question trees, depending upon what those very nice people perceive you to be asking about.
So we went through fifteen minutes of question tree torture and got to the end that I could see when we started.
“I need to connect you with an expert” she said.
“I thought I was already talking to an expert” I thought to myself.
Fairly quickly I was connected to the expert and I fairly quickly re-asked my question.
Imagine if you will that you had called your health exchange but had actually been connected to the IRS.
You know, the IRS that can answer any tax question by having very nice but totally inexpert people go through various question trees, depending upon what those very perceive you to be asking about.
So we went through fifteen minutes of question tree torture and got to the end that I could see when we started.
“I need to connect you with an expert” she said.
After an additional fifteen minutes of waiting, but with tasteful mandolin music this time, I was disconnected.
I really hadn’t expected much and I think they massively met my expectations.
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But the day was young and I had another, completely different customer service issue to attend to.
One of my favorite Sony digital cameras had suddenly stopped working – intermittently – in September.
I had found a Sony support chat site that I used.
The upshot of that encounter was that the camera needed to go to service.
I asked the Sony chat guy what that would cost (I was just being a prick; I knew that the answer to that was going to be “duh, what?”) but the answer was a specific amount of money.
I was caught flat footed.
Being sure that the chat guy had just blown me off, I nonetheless went to the service link that he had provided and was presented with a pleasant, useable, understandable and almost automatic user interface.
I entered the information and got a repair estimate immediately.
The estimate was exactly what the Sony chat guy had said it would be.
And it included return shipping; I had to pay for sending it to the center.
“Bullshit” I said to no one in particular: “this is just bullshit; how can they know what this is going to cost and how long will it take and why do they think they are any better than One Exchange, a Towers Watson Company?”
But I sent the camera anyway; I sent it on the 12th; it got there on the 14th after closing time so it wasn’t delivered until the next work day which was the 16th.
It was officially in their system on the 17th.
That was yesterday.
When I did a “check your repair status” web query this morning (I like to think that to be analogous to One Exchange’s “talk to an expert”) here is what I saw:
It’s going to be delivered by UPS on 25 October.
I can’t recall the last time I have been amazed and beyond description pleased.
And I can’t remember the last time I have been able to laugh so heartily at a real joke.
That joke is One Exchange: a Towers Watson Company.
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