Even if it is free, a policy from Humana (NYSE:HUM) comes at too high a price. It’s time shareholders threw out the board of directors and sent upper management to prison. Besides suffering from Gross Incompetence, this has to be some sort of malfeasance.
Agile is not Software Engineering.
“Priced right” does not make a developer qualified.
The Letters
If you are unfortunate enough to have any policy with Human where they badgered you to sign up for auto-pay, you already know what I’m talking about. For months now you’ve been getting letters in the mail stating your payment is past due. Thing of it is, your account is not past due or in arrears of any kind.
Humana has millions of customers/policies. Exactly how many isn’t that material to this conversation because you can extend the math. Let’s use 10 million customers as the number of policies signed up for auto-pay, okay?
First class postage is currently 73 cents but going up to 78 cents end of June. Each letter consists of an envelop and 3 sheets of paper. Admittedly, buying envelops and paper in bulk will generally get a company a better deal than
so instead of $40 per 5000 sheets we will use $20.
We will have to take a stab at the cost of #10 business envelops as well. Most likely a better price than this
so let’s just use $40 per 1000 envelops.
This is one of those word problems you hated in math class.
((10 million * 3 sheets) / 5000) * 20 = $120,000 in paper cost
.73 * 10 million = $7,300,000 in postage (they might have cut an Amazon like bulk deal but we are estimating)
(10 million / 1000) * 40 = $400,000 in envelop costs
You will note I left out the cost of toner/ink to actually print all of this stuff and the cost of all the computer operators who had to handle all this.
Total for this conversation $7,820,000 per month.
The Phone Menu
Probably the greatest crime against humanity ever committed is phone automation. The Humana menu is designed to never let you get to anyone who could actually help you. Customer service does not exist at Humana.
After about 5 minutes of attempting to navigate this crime against humanity to reach someone in billing you get transferred to an automated payment system you cannot get out of without hanging up.
If you tell it you don’t have your member ID, assuming that will get you to a human, you will get transferred to a dead line. No Muzack, no endless commercial, nothing. Nobody will ever pick up.
Keep in mind, I’ve spent roughly 40 years in IT. Nothing is more wretchedly designed than this phone menu. It exists to make people hang up and it should be illegal. Write your Congress person. Phone menus need to be banned nationwide.
Off-shore Only Looks Cheap
Management shows extreme incompetence when they use off-shore IT. They sure as Hell don’t calculate the extreme price off-shore labor will extract from a company.
You know there is a life insurance company in the state of Missouri that used Tata because U.S. Citizens were too expensive? These rocket scientists instituted a policy of deleting files that hadn’t been accessed in ten years to cut costs of both storage and backup. They did this for quite a while, to the point none of the full backup media was still around. Turns out the bulk of what they deleted were the text and other information of life insurance policies issued in the 1950s through possibly mid-1970s. Now, whenever anyone files a claim and has paper of proper age, the claim has to be paid. If the Federal government ever finds out they will get a true rectal reaming because they are supposed to validate their policies ever so often. If you don’t have the policy you can’t do that!
In Humana’s case, the use of “priced right” IT is costing share holders roughly $7.8 million per month that legitimate U.S. Citizens with an actual Computer Science degree would not have cost them.
Oh, don’t say “you have failures too!” No child, that just shows your ignorance. Legitimate, degreed, IT workers back a system out at the first sign of catastrophic failure. We always have a fallback and documentation on how to do it prior to the installation. This isn’t “just a little bug.” Humana’s upper management and unqualified IT department has left this hand polished turd in production for months.
It is time for Humana’s share holders to revolt, throwing out the CEO, CIO, and entire board of directors. The board of directors has not done their job. This steaming pile of excrement has been in production for months and now the general public knows you are willing to piss over $7 million per month down the drain for no good reason.
The Web Site
Ah, just use the Web site you say. Fine idea. Same “priced right” development going on there.
No way to report an issue so one logically tries the Contact option.
Good luck finding the website administrator to report this!
Summary
Here is my public service announcement.
(800) 232-2006
That is the phone number for the billing department you cannot find on the website.
Dump Human stock. This company cannot survive.
