MAKE EM PAY! How I got my Insurance Company to pay up with minimal effort. THIS CAN WORK FOR ANYBODY!
I’m hoping this story and information will help others in the future to get their skeevy insurance companies to pay for the services they are supposed to pay for.
My kids got a regular dental cleaning in January 2022 and for some reason Blue Cross Blue Shield (BCBS) never covered it. Of course my dentist wants to get paid but BCBS denied the initial claim due to an error in their code system or something ridiculous like that. In July of 2022 they covered our second dental cleaning of the year but still hadn’t paid the one in January. After 11 months of back and forth between my dentist and BCBS my Dentist asked me to step in.
So I first attempted to go through the usual means, the claim department, their chatbot, chatting with a real person who can’t actually DO anything to help…etc. I did everything except wait on hold for hours just to not get anything accomplished, because I refuse to waste MY time doing someone else’s job whenever possible.
So I decided to make it my goal to either get BCBS to pay my dentist, or failing that, waste SO MUCH of their money on employee time/payroll that they would regret not just paying my dentist the less than $500 they owed for services rendered in the first place.
The first thing I did was upload the claim documentation and copy and paste the same message to every department that I could, so that I would be wasting more than just the claim’s department’s time. I figured SOMEONE in each department would have to waste at least 5 or 10 minutes reading my initial email.
The next thing I did was try to find the names and email addresses of the executives that run Blue Cross Blue Shield. Finding names and faces was easy, they are at https://www.bcbs.com/about-us/leadership.
Unfortunately, none of these big companies list ANY email addresses of ANYBODY important enough to actually get something accomplished for us “little guys.” So what did I do? I just started guessing.
First_Last@BCBSA.com, NOPE.
First-Last@bcbsa.com? Nope
Firstlast@bcbsa.com? Nope
LastFirst@bcbsa.com? Nope
Firstname.Lastname@bcbsa.com? YES!
So I emailed the president and CEO Kim Keck, the VP and CFO Christina Fisher, the VP and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Sean Robbins, along with a few other executives the same email. I didn’t CC them I sent multiple individual emails from my work email account. The reason I chose my work email account was because I figured the spam filter of most big companies will catch email addresses that end in gmail.com or yahoo.com or any of the other major free email providers. By using my work email address I was able to ensure that my message got through.
I sent my initial emails on February 16th at 11:52 AM. By 2:19 PM that same day, I received a phone call from an assistant to Ms. Keck who within a week or 2 took care of the problem. By the way, the email address format of the assistant was firstname.lastname@BCBSNC.com because I live in North Carolina.
I’m hoping this story and information will help others in the future to get all these skeevy insurance companies to pay for the services they should pay.
Funny thing, is this is NOT the first time I’ve done something like this. I have another story of how I got Intuit to fix a problem with QuickBooks Payroll before the end of the year by contacting their executive leadership team as well.
