Have You Been Hoodwinked By Your Own Insurance Company?
Have You Been Hoodwinked By Your Own Insurance Company?
By Melinda Thomas
How horrible is this? You get on the telephone with your health insurance company and you are transferred back and forth to different mechanical operators who are not human. Press one, press two, press nine, and on and on and on, and if you want this press 11. You are simply calling to pre-certify something that you are supposed to precertify. Perhaps you have a relative with an emergency and they are in the emergency room and now you are calling your insurance company, where does that leave you. You have a ton of things to do, places to go to, medical and other things to handle, and yet you are stuck with Ms Mechanical who does not understand your call.
But wait ! This is not the worst of what will happen. Would you have ever thought that your own insurance company would mechanically transfer you to someone OUTSIDE of their company, yes, another commercial company? Here the story gets even better. Try this one on for size and let me know if this has ever happened to you:
- You call the company, your own private insurance company.
- You get the mechanical operators and you get nowhere.
- Finally after pressing nearly a million --an exageration? --other numbers, you arrive at a real human being! Wow, a human and you get excited.
- This human asks for your ID numbers and all your personal identifying information including your social security number. And you supply the information, trusting that your insurance company keeps this all private.
Then BOING!!! All of a sudden, you get a funny feeling and you ask this person, why can't they find your file. They reply that perhaps it is in there somewhere and after more and more questioning, you find out that this person is NOT employed by your insurance company at all but somehow is from another private agency having nothing to do with your insurance company. YET, you arrived at this person through your insurance company's telephone number and you trusted that only employees of the insurance company would be answering the phone. Wow, what a scam! And this is happening with major, not minor, insurance companies across the country.
How to protect yourself:
- No matter how many buttons you press and no matter how sure you are that you are on the phone with YOUR insurance company, always ask and re-ask the name of the person you are speaking with and their title and ask the name of their company. This is the only way to protect yourself from this biggest, newest scam that they have going.
- Never, ever assume that you are speaking with a member of your insurance company at all but assume you have no clue whom you are talking with and ask, ask and ask again.
- Every single time that your insurance company transfers your call to another extension, insist on asking all that information again. Ask who you are speaking with and ask the name of the company. Insist on proper identification so that you will not be scammed by anyone.
I hope this never happens to you, but know and remind yourself that there are commercial companies that are answering your private insurance companies' phones and it happens all the time.
Your comments?
Melinda Thomas, an author who has read and studied psychology for many years, offers you the latest information about the largest and sneakiest scams inside the public and private insurance company sectors. Has this happened to you? She would love to hear your reports. Melinda has attended courses in one of the largest cities in America.
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