In a world with standardized policies and guarantee issue, there are not a lot of reasons to choose one health care insurance company over another, other than maybe their doctor and facility list (and the lowest rate).
It’s a month away from the date when you have to sign up for coverage if you’re to avoid a gap in converage (assuming President Obama’s latest decree that you can keep your policy won’t stick).
Almost without exception, every insurance company I’m visiting has customer service hours from around 8am-5pm, Monday thru Friday. They haven’t realized yet they are no longer in a seller’s market where the customer has to beg for their attention. The employed, healthy people who they need to recruit to fund their risk pools tend to work during business hours, and need to do this shopping in the evening or on weekends.
You’re right, but wasn’t the idea that they could save money and reduce their administration costs by laying off their sales people and customer service people for the individual market? Everyone was to come in through the new government portal- there would be no need to sell directly, the individual market would disappear and everyone would be in a new “healthcare.gov” group that the company receives in an electronic feed from the government – the same sort of feed that the companies receive today from employer’s payroll systems. That was to be the equalizer to reduce rates on the individual market to match rates on the employer market.
Peeling back the onion, the first layer is the brokers, agents and “producers” that round up the sheep. The customer service people at the insurance company do more than just sell insurance, in fact they tend to shy away from doing that.
I feel confident the “navigators” are not licensed insurance agents and have negligible training. We’re already seeing evidence that they’re encouraging people to commit fraud during the signup process.
That’s right. Obamacare displaced insurance agents that were trained, tested and licensed by the states and replaced them with low priced community organizers that are encouraging illegal fraudulent acts, and encouraging people to sign up and vote.
Customer Service is generally for customers rather than prospects at the individual level, but there is customer service for brokers/agents and also customer service for providers- each has different FAQs and receives a different group of customer service specialists.