I met with a man who recently lost his wife to a long illness. He was still getting over his loss when he received a letter from his credit card company informing him that his card had been canceled.  He called the credit card company and was told his account had been closed because he was dead.

It seems Social Security made a mistake when his wife died and instead put into his record that he was deceased.  This information probably goes to credit reporting agencies and was picked up by his credit card company.  He told the company he was alive and well and would like to pay his last bill, which had been held by the company.  The company would not send him the bill so he could pay it because, according to their records, he was deceased.

This man called Social Security and pointed out their error.  He was told his record would  be corrected. That was three weeks ago.

This man has a Medicare Advantage plan that is being canceled and he needs to enroll in another plan, so I submitted an application for him to the AARP Medicare Complete Plus plan by UnitedHealthcare.  I checked the next day on my computer to see that his application had been received and I saw the notation, “Denied due to death”.

I’ve decided to mention the name of the company because I know they read everything that is written about them, and I mght need some help from higher up to fix this problem.

Medicare Advantage companies check the Medicare record of each applicant to make sure the information on the application is correct before they send the file to Medicare.  Medicare had gotten the report of this man’s death from Social Security, but two weeks after Social Security corrected his record, Medicare had not received the correction.

This should be an interesting case to see how two large government bureaucracies work. And UnitedHealthcare is so large that I have often said it is like the government.  We’ll see how this turns out. And hopefully it gets resolved soon because this man only has until the end of December to get enrolled in a new Medicare Advantage plan. If he misses that deadline there will be another bureaucratic mess to deal with.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 13th, 2010 at 8:54 am and is filed under Health. Tags for this post: AARP Medicare Complete, Arizona Medicare, arizona medicare advantage, change medicare advantage plans, medicare advantage arizona, medicare change, medicare mixup, medicare problems, medicare tucson, unitedhealthcare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.