A Proposal for Carefirst BCBS
Dear Carefirst Blue Cross Blue Shield,
I have a money-saving tip for you.
I’ve gotten 11 allergy shots in the past month and you’ve sent me 11 two-page Explanation of Benefits statements by mail. I’m sure my mailman is tired of delivering them and it annoys me that I now have 22 sheets of paper to file. And considering my insurance premium went up 14% this year, it really annoys me that you spent $4.62 in postage to mail all these individual statements. Why don’t you just send monthly monthy statements like everyone else in the world?
Let’s see, if you could have condensed those 11 individual statements into 6 sheets of paper–you could have cut paper costs by 73% and saved at least $3.78 in postage.
Even in the months I just get weekly shots (which is most of the time), you could save 50% on paper and spend 42 cents instead of $1.68 on postage.
I know it doesn’t sound like much, but given that you have 3.1 million members, if even 10% of those get weekly allergy shots like I do you could save $5.2 million a month on postage alone and save thousands of trees.
In fact, maybe you’d save enough to lower my premium or at least increase my prescription drug limit–which hasn’t increased at all in the past 3 years although prescription drug prices have risen more than 20%.
I’m just saying it’s something you should think about.
Posted: August 29th, 2008 under Get a Clue!.
Comments: 3
Comments
Comment from sara
Time: October 15, 2008, 1:24 am
Maybe you should utilize all the resources that have been made available by Carefirst BlueCross BlueShield, such as HCBO.com. This would be the personalized website where you can select to receive your eob’s electronically. But who thinks about doing their part, when it’s so much easier to point the finger.
Comment from ******
Time: October 15, 2008, 1:32 am
Have you ever thought about going to the Carefirst website HCBO.com and register for electronic EOB’s???? This would mean no postage
Comment from Tracy Needham
Time: October 15, 2008, 1:20 pm
Sara and ******,
Thank you for your suggestions and I wish that was the case. I searched all over the Carefirst site for information about this and didn’t find anything. So I used the email feature within My Account to ask about it and here’s the answer I received:
Thank you for your inquiry. Unfortunately, the Explanation of Benefits will continue to come to your address because we are required by law to send them out to you.
Sincerely,
Customer Service Department
By the way, you may have used personal accounts, but the IP address you’re posting from is publicly registered to Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Maryland. From the tone of your comments, I think it’s a safe guess that you’re not with the public relations department, so they may not be too thrilled you were doing this on company time.
Tracy
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