Howdy? We speak to insurers 12 million hours every week

After Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer underwent surgery years ago, he kept a folder labeled “Blue Shield Troubles”.

When Pfeffer got the offer to work with the polling firm Gallup, he suggested a study of how much time Americans spend on the phone with their health insurers. Gallup agreed.

Your result: We call our health insurance company around 12 million hours a week. (They also found that when we call our health insurers, as workers, we are more likely to miss work and more checked out and burned out at work.)

And with all of that … it’s important to know as much as you can about who we are actually talking to when making those calls. How do you make money? What are the incentives?

What few of us know: In many cases, companies don’t get paid for insurance. If you get your insurance through work, your employer is likely to “insure” itself (about two-thirds of all employees and more than 90% of people who work for companies with more than 1,000 employees).

But it’s not obvious if your job is self-insuring. You have an insurance card that says Cigna or United or Aetna, etc. But you are operating in a different universe. For example, self-financed plans are subject to federal law, so your state insurance board cannot step in and help. And that’s just a start.

In this episode we begin to orientate ourselves in this other universe. We speak to Pfeffer, Karen Pollitz from KFF, one of our favorite insurance shepherds, and journalist Leslie Walker, whose coverage for the Tradeoffs podcast suggests that companies playing their part in “self-insured” setups can go as far as to dubious practices. And the employers they work for – even large, powerful companies – often don’t have a lot of oversight or even a lot of influence.

Here is a transcript for that episode.

“An Arm and a Leg” is a co-production by KHN and Public Road Productions.

To keep in touch with “An Arm and a Leg”, subscribe to the newsletter. You can also follow the broadcast on Facebook and Twitter. And if you have health system stories to tell, producers would love to hear from you.

To hear all of the KHN podcasts, click here.

And subscribe to “An Arm and a Leg” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.