The phone rings at 7 in the morning. The phone rings at midnight. If we don\u2019t answer the phone, letting the machine screen the calls, the patients leave interminable messages, explaining that the insurance company already paid, that the second test on their sexual plumbing wasn\u2019t really necessary. It\u2019s amazing the detail about their very personal medical histories these people will pour out to the message machine of a total stranger.<\/p>\n
If we\u2019re at home and it\u2019s within normal business hours, we answer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs this the (name) medical center?\u201d they ask.<\/p>\n
(I\u2019m sure the medical center has some fine, hard-working staff. I decline to name the outfit in part because no surviving Nevada employer needs any more trouble today, what with Steven Horsford and the other armed robbers of the Nevada Legislature still at large.)<\/p>\n
\u201cMa\u2019am, you have a bill from the medical center there in front of you?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThe phone number on the bill, can you see that\u2019s a 10-digit number?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the area code is different from 702, you\u2019re going to have a dial a \u2018one\u2019 and then the entire 10 digits,\u201d we explain. \u201cIt just happens that here in the Southern Nevada area code, our home phone has the same last seven digits as your health center\u2019s office in Coral Springs, Florida.\u201d<\/p>\n
It seems that last fall the outfit decided to centralize their billing operations in Florida. We\u2019ve been attempting to conduct our polite little seminar in \u201carea codes\u201d ever since.<\/p>\n
I talked to the outfit\u2019s chief of billing about the problem four months ago. She now says that because I stopped calling, she figured the problem had gone away. It hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Monday, the brunette told me that even on days when she doesn\u2019t have to work, she can\u2019t stand to be in the house more than four hours straight.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe medical center calls?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDuh.\u201d<\/p>\n
So I started again. Tuesday morning, I called the office in Florida. (Other than the area code, I never have to look up the number. It\u2019s my number.)<\/p>\n
\u201cHi. I\u2019d like to talk to the person who\u2019s in charge of sending out your bills,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
They transferred me to \u201cRoberta.\u201d Within five seconds, I was pretty sure \u201cRoberta\u201d was not the person I needed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think you can help me,\u201d I said. \u201cI asked to talk to the person who\u2019s in charge of sending out your bills.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, I kin hep you,\u201d she said. \u201cJust give me a try; I kin hep you.\u201d<\/p>\n
I told her my name, and explained about the phone numbers.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s you account number?\u201d \u201cRoberta\u201d asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have an account number. I\u2019m not a patient. I\u2019m the guy who\u2019s getting calls from your patients day and night because you refuse to print your area code in extra-large type, or put a note in red letters on your bills that it\u2019s not a local number. That\u2019s why I told you I need to talk to the person who\u2019s in charge of sending out your bills,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAre you a patient?\u201d she asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m not a patient,\u201d I explained. \u201cThat\u2019s why you can\u2019t find my account number. I\u2019m calling because I\u2019m the guy who\u2019s getting calls from your patients at all hours of the day and night.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat company are you with?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI work for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, but that\u2019s not the main point here.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd you don\u2019t know your account number?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, Roberta, I\u2019m the guy who\u2019s going to start telling your customers that because of the Health Affordability Reform Act, enacted by the U.S. Senate last week, they don\u2019t have to pay your bills any more; they can just throw them away, because Barack Obama is going to pay them. Now are you going to let me talk to someone in charge?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cRoberta\u201d hung up on me.<\/p>\n
I tried the local offices, here in Las Vegas. I always start out asking to speak to an actual medical doctor or a corporate officer. Oh no, no need for that. Mandy, Mindy or Bimbolina always insists she can handle my problem. Between repeated interruptions of the \u201cWhat\u2019s your account number?\u201d variety, I tried to explain the problem — which I had already explained to everyone there, four months ago.<\/p>\n
When I told one of the gum-chewing micro-boppers that if I didn\u2019t get some satisfaction I was going to start telling their customers about the Health Affordability Reform Act, she shouted \u201cYou\u2019d better not do that or you\u2019re going to get in a lot of trouble!\u201d … and hung up on me.<\/p>\n
Finally I reached an office manager named Gabrielle, the first person I\u2019d reached all day who appeared to be smarter than my cat. (And Skeezix is the kind of cat who wants to look out the front door to make sure it\u2019s raining there, too.) She seemed to immediately grasp the impact of having multitudes of their patients told about the recently enacted (and thoroughly imaginary, you understand) Health Affordability Reform Act. She managed to have an actual corporate officer call me back within the hour. He said he\u2019d try to add a line to their bills, pointing out \u201cThis is a long-distance call.\u201d<\/p>\n
Think I\u2019m holding my breath?<\/p>\n
\u201cBrian\u201d also told me it would be fine if I started telling their customers to throw away their bills. Honest.<\/p>\n
Later in the day, I got a call from the person who really is \u201cresponsible for sending out their bills\u201d in Florida. Guess what? It wasn\u2019t \u201cRoberta\u201d!<\/p>\n
She said she\u2019d try again to make some changes in their bill forms. She even offered to send me \u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cafter\u201d bills to show their efforts, to my Review-Journal address.<\/p>\n
I thanked her, but pointed out how many of their employees, at so many different locations, had declined to put my calls through to someone smarter than the average potted plant even when asked, instead trying over and over and over to determine my \u201cpatient number,\u201d and finally hanging up the phone.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to understand, Vin,\u201d she said. \u201cThese are eleven-dollar-an-hour employees. You can\u2019t expect them to know how to deal with something that\u2019s outside their experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about that.<\/p>\n
I started working while in high school, at $1.60 an hour. I was thrilled, in my youthful ignorance, when the minimum wage went up to $1.75, thinking that meant \u201ca raise for everyone.\u201d I didn\u2019t realize some jobs just weren\u2019t worth $1.75, or $2.35, that some jobs that once gave kids a first step on the employment ladder — think \u201cfilling station attendant\u201d — would go the way of the dinosaur.<\/p>\n
But even when I earned $1.60 an hour, I believe I could have answered a telephone, politely determined the nature of the problem, and passed along the call to someone who could deal with it.<\/p>\n
Eleven dollars adds up to almost $23,000 a year. And you wouldn\u2019t want to see \u201cRoberta\u201d take a spelling test, believe me. Yet we wonder why U.S. firms are outsourcing so many services to India? In India there are college graduates, bright, cheerful, literate in several languages AND the jargon of computer repair, who would be tickled PINK to make $23,000 per year. Yet in America that kind of money now hires — and empowers — arrogant twits who can\u2019t even figure out when it\u2019s time to pass the call up the line, as requested, to someone who can tell you her age without tapping it out with a front hoof.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The phone rings at 7 in the morning. The phone rings at midnight. If we don\u2019t answer the phone, letting the machine screen the calls, the patients leave interminable messages, explaining that the insurance company already paid, that the second test on their sexual plumbing wasn\u2019t really necessary. It\u2019s amazing the detail about their very […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,20,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-medicine","category-nevada"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/sWqFl-462","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=462"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3007,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/462\/revisions\/3007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}