800-Medicare: Waiting For The Wrong Answer

There are two basic problems with 1-800-Medicare, the toll-free consumer hotline for people with Medicare: 

• It takes too long to talk to a live person, and
• When a live person does get on the line, they often give out incorrect or incomprehensible information.

The consequences of this shoddy service are numerous, but in general, bad advice on a Medicare problem means consumers pay much more out of pocket than they should and they do not receive the health care they need.

Recently Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon, called Kerry Weems, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and John Curtis, CEO of Vangent, the contractor running 1-800-Medicare, before the Senate Special Committee on Aging to see if improvements could be made to the hotline’s service. Senator Smith’s staff had spent hundreds of hours cataloguing the bad information given out by 1-800-Medicare. At the hearing, the Medicare Rights Center and other advocacy groups testified that the misinformation from 1-800-Medicare continues, as do frequent half-hour waits for a live customer service representative.

Weems promised the committee that average wait times for the hotline would be lower when the annual enrollment period for the Part D drug benefit begins this fall, and new initiatives would reduce the number of people holding for a customer service representative.

However, little was said that would give consumers confidence that much-needed improvements in operator training will be forthcoming, or that the scripts used by operators will be jargon-free and provide callers with the help they need in language they can understand.  

-From: “Waiting for the Wrong Answer”, Asclepios, September 11, 2008 • Volume 8, Issue 37, the Medicare Rights Center.

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