A Letter to Humana

12 June 2006

Michael B. McCallister, President
Humana Inc.
500 West Main Street
Louisville, KY 40202

Mr. McCallister:

In less than two months, I will be on Medicare. Therefore, I have started shopping for a Part D prescription coverage. Your Standard, Complete, and Enhanced plans are all near the lowest cost of all Plan D coverages relative to the prescription drugs I currently take.

However, I had some questions about your plans; so I called your toll-free phone number. After listening to inane music and hearing repeated "Your call is important to us" for over a half-hour, I realized that my call is not at all important to you. I hung up.

If my call were truly important to you, you would have sufficient call-center staff to answer the phones with a wait-time of not more than five minutes. It is painfully obvious that you now have too many customers relative to the resources available to serve them.

I have decided to subscribe to a different plan, a plan where my call is indeed important as demonstrated by how quickly I get a live human on the phone, a human who can actually answer my questions.

Sincerely,
David E. Ross