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ASPCA insurance
Monday, January 21 2008
It's not often that you get to hear the sound a thousand dollars makes as it is ripped from someone's hands, but I heard that sound this morning. Had the stock market not been closed for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day, perhaps many more of us throughout the United States would have heard that sound, but for most people that experience would have to wait for tomorrow. In our household, though, it came a day early. It sounded like this, "No! No! NOOOOOOOOOO!" It was Gretchen, and she was running over to thrust a piece of paper in front of me. The paper had been send from our provider of doggy insurance, the fine folks who happily accepted a $400 per year policy to cover our two dogs. It seems they had decided to decline our claim for Eleanor's $1000 second cruciate ligament repair, and the reason they provided was that they specifically don't cover cruciate repair for conditions diagnosed within twelve months of beginning coverage. Mind you, this very important condition had been presented in any of the paperwork marketing the insurance we'd purchased or in the information packet that had arrived once Gretchen had signed up. Indeed, they'd never bothered to send any information packet at all.
Gretchen called the insurer and fought the good fight on the phone, saying that nowhere in the documentation had there been any mention of exceptions for cruciate ligament repair. When the empathy-free person on the phone gave her lip, Gretchen accused the provider of being just like any other insurer, fucking people over for the bottom line. She'd bought the insurance through the ASPCA, a non-profit she supports, and she'd expected better. She accused the insurer of using the good name of the ASPCA to hoodwink people into signing up, only to claim to be an ASPCA subcontractor when there's a claim in contention. At one point Gretchen mentioned that she is very active in the local animal welfare community and that she'd been recommending ASPCA insurance to her friends and associates, but after this experience she would be sure to set the record straight. This led the person on the phone to announce, "It's illegal to threaten an insurer over a claim."
It went on like this for a good ten or fifteen minutes, and Gretchen did a marvelous job, but in the end she could make no traction with the asshole on the phone (who gets paid to hold the line on denied claims) so she gave up.
This left us infuriated, disillusioned, and depressed. Who can you trust in the world? Is there any company left in the world that doesn't exist exclusively to fuck people over? What good is insurance if the insurer claims a right for itself to create a list of after-the-fact policy exceptions that were never part of the initial agreement? In our legal system, the only recourse in this case would be to take these assholes to court, but they're based in a different state and in any case the necessary legal costs would outweigh any possible civil remedy.
This experience drew my attention to yet another negative consequence of communication technology and globalization: the fact that your services are now being supplied by someone very far away, someone whom you will never meet or occasion to run across on the street. Even in the best of conditions, insurers are only grudgingly helpful to their claim-filing customers. But in the good old days, back when information had difficulty traveling, your insurer tended to be a lot closer than he is today. He might have actually lived in your town. He couldn't have afforded to be too horrible because he had a local reputation to maintain. And even if that wasn't a concern, he still had to worry about the possibility of a brick coming through his window. Insurers (and many other scream-inducing service providers) don't have to worry about such things these days. They hire people to cordially say "no" on their 1-800 numbers, and this frees them to spend their days selling policies, denying claims, and making profits.
This evening I went on an exceedingly rare housecall some miles to the southwest of Woodstock. The client lived on the north side of a mountain and the nearby roads were all iced over. I was driving down one such icy road and did fine on the flat, but as I climbed a hill my car's wheels found insufficient purchase and I had to abandon my forward trajectory. When I brought the car to a stop, it proceeded to slide backwards all the way to the bottom of the hill. So I walked the rest of the way.
The client was a woman of about 50 and her ten year old child, a precocious (and extremely talkative) lad who wanted nothing in the world so much as a Gmail account. The computer was being tormented by a bit of malware called CVCHOST.EXE. Whenever it was running in the taskmanager, it used upwards of 80% of the CPU and the internet became extremely unresponsive. One would think malware authors would know better than to write code that behaves so badly; had it been less obnoxious I would have never been called and it could have continued living in its host.
The ten year old, by the way, seemed to be genuinely surprised to see an adult (me) who knew his way around a computer. Evidently all the adults in his life are various kinds of computer illiterates. He seemed to know a lot, though for some reason he needed me to show him how to sign up for Gmail. Meanwhile his mother was wondering if I had an easy way to keep him from being able to see porn. I told her not to worry, that kids that age are only interested in porn to the extent that their parents don't want them to see it, and in any case it's impossible to keep them from seeing it. What I didn't say was that it is possible to keep your kid from seeing porn, but in the process you stunt your child's facility with the medium, putting him at a disadvantage with respect to his peers and others in the job pool he will join some day. Though this mother was only eleven or twelve years older than me, I felt as though the generational fault line running through the room placed me solidly together with her curious, talkative ten year old son, who is nearly thirty years younger than me, and cutting both of us apart from her. For people of our generation the internet provides freedom, information, and communication. For people of the preceding generation it provides porn, popups, and millions upon millions of predators trying to lure our children around the tips of their throbbing phalluses.
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