Initially I thought I would like the job. We worked as a team and in the beginning all I had to do was review medical for my colleagues and I would leave as soon as my release time was done. Within a month or two, the workload started growing to a point where I was staying longer hours and felt happy when I was able to leave after 9 hours at the job (skipped lunch break). Once I started handling my own cases, the workload grew unbearable: 10 hours per day, 5 days a week were normal.
The case managers were obligated to handle it all when it came to our claims: review medical, update state offsets (requiring lengthy calculations), listen to customers venting about their pay (which we always had to redirect to their HR since we did not handle pay-just made decisions), denials (being shouted at in front of your peers: very difficult), answering voice-mails within 24 hours, doing every type of call needed: approvals, initial contacts, denials, reminders, serving as a middleman between doctors and patients, listening to everyone's complaints, reviewing pages and pages of medical.
The hardest parts of my job were handling medical and making decisions (sometimes up to 10 per day) within a couple of hours of reading medical. If medical is vague as every healthcare worker knows can happen with chronic illnesses, we had to follow-up with both the patients and the doctor's offices, which caused considerable stress from having to speak to defensive claimants and exasperated employees at the medical office and increased the workload. If one of my team members took off of work (which happened a lot since PTO is generous), the rest of the team ended up working longer to complete their share of the work. So in essence, the company did not lose any money by offering generous PTO since they made the rest of us take over and we worked several hours extra per day to make up for this. We did not work on our own pace: we had a number of tasks assigned per day which could fluctuate from 20 (which was manageable) to up to 40 (unbearable). We could not leave until each of those tasks were completed and they are monitored by our management. Pay is salaried: no overtime compensation, lunch breaks can be worked through and working 11 hours per day is the same pay as working 8 hours per day.
My peers were wonderful but there is a sense that the company does not mind saving money over the expense of their workers. It takes a very hardy person to survive the long hours. Stress, dread, anxiety and the gnawing at the pit of the stomach at the thought of going back to the work made me realize this was not work the money.
My life suffered, my family suffered, my mental and physical health suffered (gained 10 pounds from sitting long hours and depression from the work stress/no time for personal life). I could not survive a year with the company.
