Thirteen years ago, when we paid off our mortgage, I was surprised to find at how hard it was to make that final payment—not financially or emotionally, but technically. We had the money, and we were ready and eager to hand it over, but getting the bank to accept that final payment was way more complicated than I expected. It took a whole series of transactions online, by phone, and in person at our local branch to get the job done.
Right now, we're having similar problems with another big life transition: Brian's retirement. Specifically, the process of switching over to a new health care plan.
The problems started in January, when Brian chose February 11 as his official retirement date. I got straight to work trying to sign us up for new coverage on Get Covered NJ, only to run into a snag: because it was January, the state was still in the middle of "open enrollment." If I signed up for a new plan during that period, it would automatically start on February 1, while Brian was still employed—and double-dipping on coverage is a big legal no-no. So I had to wait until February 1 to sign up for a new plan that would start on March 1.
Once I'd done that, I still had to take care of all the other details associated with changing coverage, like choosing a new primary care doctor and transferring our prescriptions. To do that, I needed to set up an online account with the insurer. And here I ran into my second snag: Because our new insurance plan was with the same provider as our old plan, I already had an account on their website. I could find no obvious way to add my new plan to that account, soI struggled through the maze of customer support and eventually learned that I'd have to wait until the new plan took effect on March 1 (today) to create an account for it.
So, this morning, right after breakfast, I settled down for what I figured would be a busy day of paperwork (or, since it was all going to be online, pixelwork). I punched in all my details—name, date of birth, member ID—and tried to create an account. And ran straight into snag three: I couldn't create an account using my email address because I already had one linked to my old account. I could still log into that old account, but it only had information about the old plan that had just expired. And because it was Sunday, I couldn't call or chat with customer service to fix the problem. Until the customer service lines open tomorrow morning, I'm stuck in limbo.
Annoying as that situation is, it seems positively straightforward compared to the problem I'm having with the website for our new dental savings plan. I registered on that insurer's site as soon as I bought the policy—or at least, I thought I had. But when I tried logging in today, using my email address and the password I'd selected, it told me either my username or my password was wrong. Okay, no big deal: I just clicked on "find my username" and entered my member ID, name, and date of birth to get my official username. Then I entered that username and the password I'd selected...and once again, the site told me that one of the two was wrong. So I took a different tack and asked to sign in without a password, using my username and date of birth to receive a login code. And I got the same error again. It told me that either the username it had just given me or the date of birth I gave it to get that username was wrong. I must have gone through the same cycle four or five times—check the username, enter the username and password, enter the username without the password—before I gave up. So that's yet another customer service call I need to make tomorrow.
Naturally, all this left me feeling a bit disgruntled. But as I was about to make some snarky remark to Brian about how much technology has "simplified our lives," I thought, well, wait a minute: would this actually have been any simpler before the Internet? And as it happened, I already knew the answer, because the last time I'd signed up for private health insurance was in 1995, before any of this stuff could be done online. To get my policy back then, I had to make an appointment to meet in person with an insurance agent, drive to his office, look at a list of plan options he presented to me, flip through a bunch of paper books to compare them, sign the enrollment forms for my chosen plan by hand, and pay my first monthly premium by check. The whole process was a much bigger hassle than this year's online enrollment, even with all the glitches. It just didn't feel like a big hassle back then because there was no simpler alternative.
This little glimpse back down memory lane has helped me put my #firstworldproblems in perspective. Yes, it's annoying that these websites are so hard to use. But it's also kind of amazing that they exist at all. Looking at the situation through 1995-era Amy's eyes, having to wait until Monday to call customer service—from my own home, most likely in my pajamas—doesn't seem like such a big deal.
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