Enclosed please find our Notice of Privacy Practices. Under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), we are legally required to distribute this policy and obtain the signature of each family member who receives prescriptions through our mail service pharmacy acknowledging that they have received it. Parents should sign on behalf of their minor children.
Please take a few minutes to review the policy, and then have each adult member listed below sign their names in the appropriate spaces.
No problem, except of course that the policy wasn't enclosed. So I called and said that I would be happy to sign the letter as requested, but the policy was not enclosed and that being the case I couldn't sign the letter to say that I had received and reviewed it. I was told by the very confused Customer Service representative, that the policy is never enclosed and that I just needed to sign the letter and send it back.
Seriously...
I refuse to believe that I'm the only person who ever pointed out the lunacy of sending letters to customers asking them to acknowledge receipt of a document they have in fact NOT received.
A bit frustrated with the woman on the telephone, I sent a fax to the company.
No response...
So here we sit in some kind of perverse stalemate. I'm not signing their stupid letter and they're not sending the bloody policy. Of course they can opt to stop sending me my medicine, but I am prepared to fight this. Okay, I'm prepared to fight it for the next six weeks, then it's a moot point anyway.
Stay tuned for developments...
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ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of how I fought to get the 'Certificate of Approval for Marriage in the UK'.
ReplyDeleteI was asked to submit the original copy of Fanne's Visa for marriage in the UK, which she had to apply in Taiwan and then come to BritainK to hand in to the Home Office.
Fanne was asked to present to the British Visa authority in Taipei the bloody Certificate, which I had to apply for from the Home Office.
See, a hopeless, Brito-bureaucratic-blood-red-tape- catch-22 situation!
God bless"ed". Finally, I went to the MP for Stirling Constituency and the chief officer sorted this out for me.
The only thing that ever works when battling a mindless oppressive bureaucracy (whether governmental or corporate) is to write to the top boss. In this case, write to the CEO (hsi name is on their website no doubt) and inform him that you will report the company for what you think is an unfair and presumably illegal privacy practice to their regulator (HHS probably.)
ReplyDeleteThanks Mr. Frog!!
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