Policyholders could receive letters from their health insurers following an injury or accident—the letters ask recipients more details about their mishaps to determine whether or not their claims could be covered.
But what if the recipient of one such letter was a 3 year-old boy who could barely read or write?
That was the case of Jeff Vrabel, a columnist for The Washington Post, who recounted how an insurance company wrote his son a letter for a playground injury that resulted in a broken arm.
According to Vrabel, the letter came months after his son had sustained the injury, which suggested that the insurer had access to the information.
Vrabel’s satire/humor piece explored the absurdity of why an insurance company (whose identity was not disclosed in the column) would want to press for answers from a child who had just christened his stuffed kitten “Taco.”
“The letter confused me, and I spent some time mulling it,” Vrabel wrote. “First, it seemed unlikely that the Insurance Company didn’t know whom they were addressing. I don’t know much about insurance companies, joyfully, but I’m pretty sure that in the vast store of knowledge they’ve amassed about my family’s medical history, Social Security information, genetic markers, pre-existing medical conditions and Singulair orders there’s probably a little box marked ‘age.’ And in that category there’s probably a littler box marked ‘0-5,’ or at least a Juniors division.”
The author perceptively noted that the letter could have been a way for the insurer to find a loophole to wiggle its way out of paying for the child’s cast.
“[If] I didn’t know what genial, trustworthy organizations insurance companies were I’d suspect they were seeing if they could get out of paying for my kid’s purple cast somehow,” Vrabel remarked.
While Vrabel had his doubts, the letter was ultimately addressed to his son, not for him. So he did the “sensible” thing and read the letter to his kid. Vrabel was careful to press his son for answers to the letter’s questions; questions such as whether the injured was a sole proprietor, was the injured driving at the time of the accident, or has he hired an attorney. Unsurprisingly, the boy could not give any answers, and would rather munch on bacon.
Vrabel’s piece ends with his thoughts about the letter, and how it serves as “implicit commentary on about 6,000 things wrong with America.” He revealed that his son took the letter and scribbled over it with a red marker—a modified document Vrabel intends to mail back to the company as a response.
