Aetna insurance--love it or hate it?

[amitten]

I need a new policy--never tried Aetna. Yay or nay...?

PS--I know they all suck in one way or another.

[haele]

1. We have a PPO through work, it's pretty good -

Of course, your MMV depending on what they negotiated with your company, but we have relatively reasonable co-pays, pharmacy costs, and there are a lot of services in network, including some alternative health (Acupuncture and Chiropractic) They've got a good special pharmacy (my husband has a $1300 a shot injectable he needs to take every 2 weeks; with the mail order, it only costs us $20 for one month on their special pharmacy program) that's on mail-order, even though their regular mail pharmacy sort of sucks.
They even have a few good clinics and labs (Sleep studies, Weight loss/surgery) that they have direct coverage with.
Billing is pretty reasonable - there's very little they haven't covered, and they do try to work with your doctors, especially when it comes to non-standard therapies. We still run an average of $800 - $1K out of pocket a month with two family memebers with serious chronic health problems, not including the $310 a month premium, but the deductable was only $50 for each of us and I figure that without the insurance we would be looking at close to $10K a month for fairly routine but necessary medical service for our family - mainly for the 20+ regular medications, medical equipment rental and monthly checkups/lab work.

We've had better experiance with Aetna than Blue Cross of California or Kaiser. We don't exactly love it - single payer would be so much better on the wallet - but it's pretty decent, and does cover preventative health, dental, Physical Therapy, and mental health better than most other plans.

Haele

[NewJeffCT]

3. depends on the policy

I had Aetna insurance through most of the 90s and had very few problems with it. However, we have it now and it's often a pain in the butt.

[KitchenWitch]

2. We have been insured by them since January (PPO)

So far I am not displeased with them.

We had Blue Shield of CA (HMO) last year. I think Aetna has been better so far for us than the HMO last year. We also had Kaiser and quite frankly Kaiser sucked elephant tea bags for us. I waited over 6 months for a procedure that really should have been done STAT. I also waited 4 months for an echocardiogram through Kaiser.

[vi5]

4. It depends on the company and the plan...

I had them through my old employer and they were our insurer when my son was born with a whole host of medical conditions that required months of hospitalization. Then after he was discharged with certain ongoing conditions/treatments they paid for 16 hours of in home nursing for 2 years until my company got sold and I had to switch insurers.

Again, how much of this was my company specific plan and how much was Aetna is up for debate. But even aside from what they covered their customer service reps were always extremely pleasant and accomodating and very helpful as was the case manager we were assigned to help us through with the magnitude of my son's bills.

So....yeah, it all depends but you'll never hear me say a bad word about them.

[amitten]

5. Thanks--that is pretty reassuring. n/t

[vi5]

6. Yes, even if you look at it just from customer service.....

Honestly because of our situation I have to be on the phone with whoever our insurance company is a few times a month. And regardless of company or plan, those are Aetna personnel. And every person I ever spoke to seemed reasonably intelligent, personable, and accomodating. And our case manager was a fairly well versed registered nurse who helped us with a lot and who could speak intelligently to his admittedly rare conditions.

Now we have Blue Cross Blue Shield, and honestly the customer service reps sound barely literate and the amount of background chatter leads me to believe they're all simply corralled in an open warehouse somewhere at tables with phones. And our "case manager" if you can even call her that is horrible.