Baby steps from Tufts Health Plan

Five days ago, I published an open letter to Tufts Health Plan about the many ways in which they have made it unpleasant to deal with them since I first became a member seven months ago. I sent a link to this letter to a supervisor in their Appeals and Grievances Department, asking her to bring it to the attention of the appropriate people within their organization and to reply and confirm that she had done so.

She has not replied.

However, just five days later, many of the issues I complained about have now been fixed. Specifically, I received new “Summary of Payments” (SOP) notification emails today which fixed nearly all of the issues I pointed out:

• The “From” line of the email now says “Customer_Web_Inquiry@tufts-health.com” instead of “NoReplyTest@clarityssi.com”.
• There is no longer confusion between the subject and body of the email about whether it’s about a Summary of Payments vs. an Explanation of Benefits.
• Several ridiculous formatting errors in the body of the email have been fixed.
• The member portal link in the email now points at the correct portal, not some other portal I’ve never used that I can’t log into or register on.

I don’t know whether this timing is just a coincidence, that is, I don’t know whether they fixed these issues because I pointed them out or they were already working on fixing them before I reached out. Either way, I’m glad to see there’s been some progress.

Note that one significant issue with these notification emails still has not been fixed. The email doesn’t say which member it’s about, so if your coverage includes minor children, you receive notification emails about their SOPs as well, but there’s no indication of that, so it just seems like the same notification sent multiple times in error.

Furthermore, the SOP for me on their member portal is still egregiously wrong.

Some improvement is better than nothing, so I’m glad to see these positive changes, but I would be even more glad if they had apologized to me for the problems I encountered, or at least thanked me for bringing these problems to their attention, or at least acknowledged my complaints in some way.