From: iwascaite	Date: December 31st, 2003 12:27 pm (UTC)		(Direct Link)

Could you imagine what the database matching would be like to automatically handle the kind of referral paperwork you mentioned? Gack. I am sure you already get enough problems just by only having one name....

And exactly what reasons would the insurance company have for making it easy for you? They make it difficult and you just pay the bill instead of spending 5 hours working on it, instant savings. Plus the longer it takes, the longer they can take to pay, and sure the twelvth of a percent is not a lot on your $115 bill, but summed over the millions they shell out on a monthly basis? There is no downside for them, there isn't a lot of economic pressure from customers because all insurance companies do this.

Honestly, what you want to happen is about a hundred times harder to handle than you think it is. It's trivial if you're talking about a person looking at it. Software to handle that kind of moving target is lightyears beyond what currently exists.