During the open enrollment period for 2014 healthcare insurance a few months ago, my wife and I chose the AARP Medicare Rx Preferred plan offered by United Healthcare, the largest health insurance provider in America. How could we go wrong? UnitedHealthcare is an operating division of UnitedHealth Group, the largest single health carrier in the United States. A United Healthcare unit had been chosen to fix the healthcare.gov website. They are reputed to be a company with the technical expertise to make the health care system run more efficiently. Efficiency is desperately needed in healthcare. How efficient is United Healthcare?
UnitedHealthcare delivers products and services to approximately 70 million Americans. Their network includes 751,609 physicians and health care professionals, 80,000 dentists and 5,629 hospitals, and access to drugs for 13 million people. The company claims it has made significant investments in research and development, technology and business process improvements – nearly $3 billion in the past five years. They say the investments led to changes that are improving the way care is delivered and administered. I am not impressed with their business processes. See my commentary at Healthcare Insurance Information Technology
This morning, my wife wanted to look up something at the MYUHC website. She did not know her user id, so she clicked on “I don’t know my user id”. The website presented a page asking for name, date of birth, account number and group account number. For the account number, it said “Do not include numbers after dash or space in ID (i.e. 1234567-00).” Webpages can be very smart. If they don’t want the dash or the last two numbers, they should just ignore them. Duh. From a user perspective, it would make sense to enter what is on the ID card. This is so elementary a high school kid could program it. But, not the largest health insurance company which has spent $3 billion on process improvements? Then the Group ID; there is no group ID on the ID card. No problem, it says to call tech support. They are only open M-F 9-5. If Amazon operated like UnitedHealthCare, they would be bankrupt. When people say they want a single payer for healthcare, they may not want what they are asking for. Bigger is not always better. Economies of scale can become diseconomies of scale. UnitedHealthCare lacks a net attitude.
