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.
