Another rant. Get used to it.

Here’s another rant sprinkled with some personal health information.  Back in 1998 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.  I ha d a grapefruit-size tumor in my chest that had to be removed, and then I went through 6 months of chemotherapy.  Anyway, everything is fine now, and I am considered pretty much cured since it has been almost 10 years since my diagnosis with no reoccurrence.

I am telling you all of this to get to my rant.  My lovely wife and I decided a few months back that it was about the right time on our lives to start looking at life insurance.  So we looked around, and we decided to call SelectQuote, which is one of those insurance brokers that go to a lot of different companies and get the best rates.  They were great, and they have been very helpful.  But a problem arose when the underwriters at West Coast Life (the actual insurance company) looked at my medical records.  We all knew and agreed up front that my rates would be a little higher because of my history, and they were higher, but not as bad as I thought they would be.  So we pulled the trigger and started the ball rolling (that sentence was full of metaphors - sheesh).

They came and did the blood draws and blood pressure and pee-in-a-cup thing, and then we gave them contact info to our doctors so they could get all our records.  So we started waiting to hear back so we could sign the papers and start feeling a little secure financially.  Well, a few weeks went by, and SelectQuote called back and told me that they were having trouble getting records from my oncologist.  They said they would take care of it, so we started waiting again.  A couple of weeks rolled by again, and we got another call asking me to see if I could call my oncologist and push the process along.  I was getting annoyed, but I figured it wasn’t their fault, so I called the medical records department of my oncologist’s office. 

I got a recording.  Well, OK, I’ll leave a message.  I told them I was trying to get life insurance and that I needed them to get their act in gear (I was much nicer than that).  I never heard back from them, so I called again a couple of weeks later (after SelectQuote had called me back saying they still had not heard from my oncologist).  Still got the answering machine.  I left another message, and I still never got a call back.  OK, now I am just annoyed because these people are messing with my feelings of security.  I wanted to KNOW that my wife and kids would be OK if I met with an untimely demise.

So I was about to make a trip to the office when I got a call back from SelectQuote saying that they might have figured out what was going on.  So I waited another couple of weeks with no more news.  Then finally, when I was at Seaworld in San Antonio last weekend (a post and pictures are coming from that trip), I got a call from SelectQuote.  After playing phone tag, I finally got in touch with them on Monday, and it looks like West Coast Life turned me down because I had not had a cancer follow up in a while.  I also got a letter from them stating the same thing.  My agent told me that I needed to go back to my oncologist to get whatever tests that I needed to make sure I am still cancer free (which kinda scares me because I am worried they are going to find something, even though I am have no symptoms - purely psychological).

So I make the call to my oncologist to get an appointment setup, and WHAM!!!, they answer the phone!  Imagine that!!!  If I need some info from them but will not make them any money (it is just affecting my life in profound ways), I get no call back and it takes weeks to get results.  If I want to setup an appointment that will probably result in a few high-dollar tests being run, then I get a live body on the phone.  Man, what a crappy way to run a business!  What happened to professionalism and pride in your work?

ARGH!

Mikey