Rant mode engaged. I’m a state pencil pusher. I administer benefits for elected officials, their staff, with regular administrative employees. I’m 100% convinced that as a whole, Americans are functionally illiterate. I will spend 30 minutes to an hour crafting an organized email with TL;DR bullet points at the end to have people call me to ask me a question that said email already answered. Bro/sis, did you even attempt to read the words on the page? It’s not an age thing, or an education thing either. It’s old people and young people. It’s elected officials, people with PhDs, masters, and JDs, along with highschool and college graduates. It’s gotten to the point that I will make people pull up the email I sent out to read along while I point out where in the text their questions were already answered. I’m one person doing the work of 3, and god damn I hate doing the same task over and over because people can’t be bothered to fucking read.

  • WashedupcynicOPEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    -Process insurance enrollment in a state database that gets transmitted to the insurance carriers daily.

    -Enrollment requires a metric fuck ton of paperwork. I make sure the paperwork is in order so it is in accordance with state laws on the books related to insurance enrollment for state workers so we can pass our audits. (I don’t know what happens if we fail audits, because I haven’t failed one yet.)

    -Inform people as soon as they are eligible for insurance, educate them about the plans in general, how the ACA works, what constitutes preventative service, how to use the online tools with the insurance carriers to find providers and view claim information.

    -Employees with issues bring me their EOBs and I will walk them through why something isn’t covered, or if it should be, conference calls with the insurance carriers and employee to attempt to resolve. I’ve assisted employees with filing insurance appeals, followed by external appeals with a neutral 3rd party through the state’s department of financial services to get insurance appeal denials overturned. (Those are my fucking favorite. Forcing our carriers to meet their contractual obligations is what I live for after working directly with insurance carriers for a decade and witnessing all the ways they fuck over their customer base.)

    -Educate people on other benefits, like the state pension. Process enrollment into the state pension system in a second database, and our internal pay serve.

    -Some benefits like flex spending for health care require the employee to enroll themselves. Aside from teaching people what the benefit is with the accompanying literature, I also have to help people troubleshoot self enrollment in those products because they couldn’t be arsed to look at my step by step instructions with screenshots.

    -Take calls from people that show up to their doctor/vision/dental appointment without their god damned insurance information and they want it now. Spoiler alert, that’s not information I have access to due to HIPAA law passed 30 years ago in the 1990’s, but there’s a plethora of 50-80 year old adult men that are happy to cuss me out for not acting like their personal mommy/secretary.

    -In person on boarding, with less than 24 hours notice that on boarding is happening, without the signed contracts I need to determine what the fuck an employee is eligible for.