I have been a member for 33 years and have usually been fairly satasfied. Recently, however, I had a problem with my personal physician and after numerous attempts to work with him and then with Group Health (all the way up to the top administration if you would believe it), they have simply refused to be held accountable for the pain and difficulties they have put me through. Instead they have stalled and stalled, lied, misdirected me, and done everything else in the book to avoid accountability. Why? After some months of waiting and thinking about this, I've concluded it's simply because they maintain a culture of unaccountability and have obviously become quite good at avoiding it! Why be accountable if you don't have to? Practice makes perfect. It appears to simply be the way they do things--and essentially they know they can get away with it. I believe they have had a lot of practice applying their various techniques as per my experiences so I now feel I haven't been subjected so much to personal violations, but simply subjected to their corporate methods which are indeed abusive--ie. but nothing personal about it! It causes me to wonder just how many other members have actually been abused by their system. A final question: is there anyone in Group Health that is actually accountable? My experience is "No".
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