You Too Could Save $00** Using a Service You Already Have!
We got a wonderfully funny letter from Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts today, partially reproduced here (click to enlarge):
The letter goes on to explain that certain of our prescriptions, we could get them home delivered for $00 less than what we pay to pick them up! How cool is that! The flip-side lists the prescriptions, in a completely empty list, with the proviso (denoted by the double-asterisk) that if our doctor prescribed any prescription for short-term use, it may not apply.
-TimK
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Comments
Modern IT at its finest!
Ironically, if BCBSMA is like most companies that use IT, they probably (inadvertently) put in place the incentives that resulted in the software that generated this waste of a postage stamp.
-TimK
Hi, Paula. I was just remembering back to my days as a software developer (not long enough ago for me to have forgotten, unfortunately). Most managers and execs I saw, they pressed for code to be delivered, whether it worked or not, whether it met requirements or not, sometimes without even knowing what the requirements were, and often ignoring or arguing with software developers who told them about the process problems that could produce bugs like this one. Even now as an author, I follow the credo: it’s better to do it right the first time than to fix it over and over again. But most SD managers don’t understand this basic truth of efficiency.
Ironically, because of the inexpensive developer wages in places like India and Mexico, some companies are hiring contract houses in these places to generate the code, very cheaply—that is, inexpensive and it doesn’t actually work. Then they have high-priced engineers in the US fix the bugs and get the code ready to deploy. Now, when I was a journeyman, they put the newbies on bug-fixing duty, so that they could see how good code was written. But this new practice reverses those roles. I haven’t seen actual numbers, but I can’t imagine that’s actually working as intended, because it’s always cheaper not to introduce bugs in the first place than to hire high-priced experts to fix them.
That would be like me, as a writer, hiring a wanna-be writer to help me with my next book, but instead of starting him out in the proofreading department, I start him out by asking him to write my next book for me, NaNoWriMo style, lots of words and who cares how good they are, because a newbie will be able to generate lots of words… that say absolutely nothing like what I would want them to say. Then I spend the next year trying to edit, rearrange, revise, and otherwise make a publishable manuscript out of the piece of junk that he created for me. How many authors do you know that, not knowing anything about fiction, sat down, wrote the great American novel, and ever sold it. Not many. I was recently reading an old article by Holly Lisle, in which she admits that her first manuscript never sold, not even after she revised it as an expert. It was simply past hope.
Well, that’s what some companies are doing with their software and IT development.
-TimK
I don’t know about Blue Cross, Tim. My husband recently got a letter from them explaining his upcoming premium increase, which was actually a decrease. (Not complaining about that!)
Then I got a letter telling me that because of an age change, my premium will go up on March 1st. However, my birthday is in mid-May, so why are they increasing my premium because of age 2.5 months early?