My prescription insurer is Humana, the fourth largest healthcare insurer in the country. (Considering the business model of healthcare insurance companies, that means it’s a fucking big outfit.) The division that handles Humana’s mail order pharmacy is called CenterWell. Not an everyday brand, but as part of Humana, you’d kind of think it’s got some legitimacy in the field.
My primary care practice is OneMedical—as in
Amazon OneMedical. (Don’t @ me; the preponderance of providers I’ve had there
have been excellent, and you can always get an appointment when you need one.
They also spend 20 minutes with you, instead of the industry-standard 15, or
the 10 minutes I get at my orthopedic practice. And I’ve been with them since
before the Amazon takeover.) Again—not hard to find or contact.
So it has been an absolute clusterfuck of
an experience to get two medications my doctor prescribed for me into the
CenterWell system…for more than two weeks.
I got the prescriptions filled for two
one-month runs at CVS; after lab work confirmed that they were working, I used
the CenterWell website to request a transfer. (During the second month, I
received both emails and snailmail urging me to make the shift to save money.)
I did everything as instructed and got online confirmation.
So when a week went by and I hadn’t
received anything, I went back to the website. Seeing so signs of an order in
process, I used their chat, where I allegedly got a human identifying itself as
Sally. She informed me that “the fax we sent to your doctor was not a correct
number.” She kept repeating, “The number we had was incorrect.” With some
probing, I discovered that it took them six days to follow up the failure to
connect, “[b]ut now we have the correct number and the new request was sent and
we are waiting for your doctor to respond.”
Well, I terminated the chat and called
their “customer care” line, where I spoke with Terri. She gave me the same
improbable story: they only do this stuff by fax, and (implication) waiting six
days to follow up is SOP. I still couldn’t get any sense out of my query as to
why they didn’t have OneMedical contact details.
But, since I’m a girl who believes in
redundant systems, I went to the OneMed portal and requested that they send the
90-day Rx to CenterWell. A little non-plussed to have one of the OneMedical
staff ask for CenterWell’s name/address, as it wasn’t in their system, but I
tracked it down and gave it to her. She said she’d sent them the prescriptions.
That was Friday.
Over the weekend I got two of these
emails:
Which did not fill me with warm and fuzzy
confidence. So I went online yesterday to find that CenterWell had no sign of
having anything they were processing. (There was also no information relative
to the email—I clicked on the link and got nothing that would tell me what
provider or medication their email referred to.)
In chat, “Julia” kept repeating such
vapid, banal phrases—wrapped around the reality that she’s “mute” and therefore
cannot do anything that would help break the logjam—that I asked her if she’s
a bot. She says no, but…
Anyway—a call to customer care, where I
get Belinda. Belinda has clearly seen some things. Belinda listens, checks up
my history (seeing that I’ve been getting the meds filled at CVS) and says, “I’m
going to call your doctor while you stay on the line. We’ll get 30 days at CVS,
and when 15 days have passed, it will automatically trigger the 90-day request
for mail order.” And she did it. While I was waiting, a notification came in
from OneMed that they were reviewing the prescription request, and 15 minutes
later, I had the confirmation.
But here’s the thing: two bloody
multi-billion dollar companies with systems out the wazoo couldn’t get shit
done for two fucking weeks until one woman called another. It shouldn’t have
required that.
©2025 Bas Bleu
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