I’ll go first. I did lots of policy writing, and SOP writing with a medical insurance company. I was often forced to do phone customer service as an “additional duties as needed” work task.
On this particular day, I was doing phone support for medicaid customers, during the covid pandemic. I talked to one gentleman that had an approval to get injections in his joints for pain. (Anti-inflamatory, steroid type injections.) His authorization was approved right when covid started, and all doctor’s offices shut the fuck down for non emergent care. When he was able to reschedule his injections, the authorization had expired. His doctor sent in a new authorization request.
This should have been a cut and dry approval. During the pandemic 50% of the staff was laid off because we were acquired by a larger health insurance conglomerate, and the number of authorization and claim denials soared. I’m 100% convinced that most of those denials were being made because the staff that was there were overburdened to the point of just blanket denying shit to make their KPIs. The denial reason was, “Not medically necessary,” which means, not enough clinical information was provided to prove it was necessary. I saw the original authorization, and the clinical information that went with it, and I saw the new authorization, which had the same charts and history attached.
I spent 4 hours on the phone with this man putting an appeal together. I put together EVERY piece of clinical information from both authorizations, along with EVERY claim we paid related to this particular condition, along with every pharmacy claim we approved for pain medication related to this man’s condition, to demonstrate that there was enough evidence to prove medical necessity.
I gift wrapped this shit for the appeals team to make the review process as easy as possible. They kicked the appeal back to me, denying it after 15 minutes. There is no way it was reviewed in 15 minutes. I printed out the appeal + all the clinical information and mailed it to that customer with my personal contact information. Then I typed up my resignation letter, left my ID badge, and bounced.
24 hours later, I helped that customer submit an appeal to our state agency that does external appeals, along with a complaint to the attorney general. The state ended up overturning the denial, and the insurance company was forced to pay for his pain treatments.
It took me 9 months to find another 9-5 job, but it was worth it.
My retail job at a Home Depot is the closest I’ve come to a rage quit. Since I’ve already read a dozen not actual rage quit stories, figured I’d share my own not actual rage quit story.
The management at the store I joined treated everyone below them like trash. Very unprofessional, very demotivating. At the time the pay was just barely above minimum wage, nothing to write home about. And, I didn’t have a car at the time, neither did most of my friends, so it meant I had to walk to work and back each shift, the walk itself being about 45+ minutes.
Management knew all this, but would schedule me to close one day, open the next. When you close, you have to stick around an extra 1 - 2 hours after your scheduled shift to help get the store ready for open in the morning. Then to top it off, at least once a month, there’d be a mandatory 6 a.m. store-wide prep rally.
The final weekend I worked there, I closed Saturday night, had that 6 a.m. meeting Sunday morning, then had to stick around until 11 a.m. (or something like that) for the start of my actual work shift. I didn’t get home until midnight, then woke up at 5 a.m. on Sunday and went to the prep rally where they basically convinced us that we were all shitty workers doing a shitty job, and then expected us to sing and dance in solidarity. I finally started working after all that, and my supervisor/manager was jumping on everyone of us that day. I looked at my coworker that sometimes gave me a ride, muttered an impotent “sorry but fuck this”, walked home, and never returned.
And then everybody clapped and the president of Home Depot called me up and personally apologized to me, told me they fired the whole store, and offered to give me a unicorn, which I had to turn down because my dorm had a strict no pets policy. The end.
That’s some purgatory type shit. Those hours better be paid. Also, sad to hear about the unicorn