When is insurance not insurance?

[TheSHAD0W]

... When it's actually an HMO that calls itself insurance.

Silly me, sent hundreds of dollars to a certain blue insurance company thinking I was getting general health insurance. Unfortunately, it means most of the good doctors in my area aren't part of their "network". Guess I won't be a customer of theirs for very long.

[Minflick]

Did you make it to open enrollment to alter things in time?!

[KuariKaydrith]

HMOs suck so much! I've never had to personally deal with one, but one of my call center jobs was dealing with people enrolling in medical through their employer (their employer was our client). Some people actually LIKE the idea of an HMO, which blows my mind because an HMO's network is pretty specific and often have no travel coverage or will only pay a tiny amount of medical expenses that happen out of network, if you're lucky.

I used to recommend to folks signing up for new benefits to find out what networks their current doctor is in and go from there. And if they travel that an HMO is really not the best choice. Of course, it doesn't help when the insurance company doesn't make it clear that the plan they are provided is an HMO. The client I worked for actually had their own plans and had deals with different insurance companies to fit to those plans, but once the employee was on their own they often had to fight to get the insurance company to uphold the plan. That lead to a lot of three-way phone calls where I would pretty much have to force the insurance company to do what they were supposed to according to the contract they had signed with the client...the client actually dropped one of the insurance companies for their bullshit.

[dalesys]

Toe To Toe With The HMO - Four Bitchin' Babes (Camille West)