Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Changing health insurance providers, from Anthem to Humana

It's open enrollment season, and my university has decided to change health care providers. Our health insurance used to be Anthem, but they have switched to Humana. Of course, that is just a decission we have to accept. On a first look, the plans, the costs and the copayments with the new Humana plan are similar to those we had when Anthem was our health insurance provider (though the employee cost is now 30 dollars more a month). I checked the doctors that supposedly are in Humana's network, and there doesn't seem to be a significant difference with Anthem.

I highlited supposedly because my biggest complain with Anthem was that they would intentionally include Doctors in their booklets as included in their network, but when you called those doctors offices they would patiently explain you that they had not been accepting Anthem patients for the past few years because of the way Anthem tried to reduce their reimbursement rate. This wasn't much of a problem with GP, but trying to find certain specialists that accepted Anthem was a daunting and frustrating task. Coincidently, I was at a doctors (a specialist) office last week, and after he finished he said that he would see me in three months, as usual. So I told him about how my university is switching health care providers from Anthem to Humana, and asked him if he accepted Humana. Oh my, you should have heard his rant. His answer was basically that he would accept Humana's patients for the time being, but he didn't know for how long. A month ago Humana had contacted him to try to force him to reduce his reimbursement rate by 20%. he said that he doesn't have that many Humana patients, so he can afford it right now, but he didn't know for how long.

As you can imagine, now I'm scared about the switch. I used to think Anthem was bad, but this sounds equally bad. Is anybody familiar with Humana? Or more generally, has any of you switched health care providers within the same city (meaning the switch was not motivated by moving to a different location)? Is it much of a pain in the a$$, or does it go smoothly? I'd really love to know.

2 comments:

  1. I have Humana. It was the only option offered by Think Tank. Can't really speak to the quality of doctors as I haven't been to one since on this plan. However, when trying to book appointments for TTB, I found that several doctors listed on Humana's site in our area were NOT actually accepting Humana patients any longer, and it took some effort to find one.

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  2. Great, same as Anthem, but now I'll have to look again...

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