Open Harassment Period
"Every year, Medicare’s open enrollment period is October 15 - December 7."
"Where can CMS partners find information to help people with Medicare with open enrollment?" Right here:
For the past month we've been inundated with a dozen or so phone calls per day (except Sundays) from ever-so-helpful folks who are offering to guide us through the confusion of selecting an insurance provider to supplement or replace our Medicare health care benefits. These calls begin as early as 6:30 in the morning -- interrupting our sleep when we've had a difficult night -- and continue throughout the day and into the evening.
Perhaps some folks truly are confused and overwhelmed by the process of selecting a provider. But having seven weeks of non-stop calls from telemarketers who want to "help" is likely to make it worse, rather than better. The Medicare website is easy enough to navigate and provides all the information required; I've usually made my decision within a few days and don't need any "assistance".
We could send all incoming calls to voice-mail, but that complicates the process of handling the calls we do want to receive. We could could use caller-id to screen the calls and just not answer calls from suspect numbers, but then the ringing phone is still disrupting whatever we may be engaged in at the time. We could block or black-list the callers' phone numbers, but they are spoofing the numbers they call from, using a different "call-from" number each time.
It's bad enough that the insurance lobbyists pressured Congress to inject private insurance companies into the Medicare process to begin with, but Medicare actually encourages these folks "to help others with Medicare open enrollment".
Please, make it stop!
📅 c: 2022-11-16 17:20 ✏️ e:
🏷 tags: #Medicare #telemarketers #phone #harassment