I just got an invitation from my health insurance company (Humana) to try out their “preferred cost-sharing, mail-order pharmacy option under your new Humana plan that could help you save on prescriptions.” I’m skeptical of insurance company recommended mail order pharmacies. When I was practicing, I’d get letters from same saying that the patient had requested that their prescriptions be transferred. Not ever, not even once, was the patient aware that they had “requested” any such thing. In other words, fraud. In one case, the patient was in a long-term care facility and would have been unable to make such a request. (Look up “locked-in syndrome”.) In another case, the patient had been deceased for nearly a year. These insurance/pharmacies have no shame.
I’m happy with my pharmacy, but there’s one medication they haven’t been able to get so I thought I’d just see what CenterWell could do. The answer is “absolutely nothing” until you create an account and sign in. But when I tried to create an account using my Humana ID (as they requested) I was told that I already had an account. Really? I keep ironclad records of any accounts I create and the usernames and passwords, going back decades. No exceptions. Yet I had no record of this. At this point, I was concerned that someone might have created an account in my name (identity theft!). So I tried using the password recovery feature and was told it wouldn’t work because I didn’t have an account, and offered to create one. Okay. Then I was told again that they couldn’t create an account because I already had one.
sin #1: infinte loop
Thus it went. Cannot create an account because it already exists. Cannot recover the password because the account doesn’t exist.
If they’re treating me this badly when I haven’t even signed up yet, how are they going to be once they have me captured and dependent on them for medications?
I was increasingly concerned that this might be a case of identity theft, so I went digging for how the account might have come to be.
sin #2: out-of-date information
I had never heard of CenterWell Pharmacy. I suspected a re-brand, and it didn’t take long to discover that it used to be called “Humana Pharmacy.” A capture of their web site on the Wayback Machine suggests the name change happened in 2002. If they’re going to block people’s logins because they already had a Humana Pharmacy account, they really ought to mention that. I, however, did not have such an account. But this suggested that Humana, the insurance company and Humana, the pharmacy doing business as CenterWell might have an incestuous relationship.
sin #3: account created without my knowledge or consent
This comes perilously close to being actual identity theft. I use tagged email addresses so I can track where my email addresses are used. I created a new one in December 2022 when I enrolled (for the first time ever in my life) in a Humana insurance plan. With growing suspicion, I tried the email address that was only ever used with my 2022 Humana account to try to recover a password for CenterWell Pharmacy. Yes, Humana had created an account in my name — likely “agreeing” to terms-of-service when they did so — all without my knowledge or consent.
sin #4: pathetic site security for your personal health information
I was asked to create a new password. (Since I didn’t create the account, I had no idea what the existing password was.) They limit you to fifteen characters and they only allow four special characters (#, *, $, and @). This is horrendously bad security. I use passwords with a length of at least 21 characters and a good mix of weird ones. For a web site protecting health information in 2026, these restrictions are bad to the point of being risible. Their trust score just went to zero.
sin #5: turning an information request into an invoice
Imagine if, say, Amazon didn’t show inventory or prices on their web site. Instead, they told you to put the item in your cart to get the price and find out if they actually had it to sell. Imagine, further, that when you put an item in your cart, they went ahead and processed the order without ever showing you a price or giving you a chance to confirm, accept, or reject it. That’s what CenterWell Pharmacy did when I tried to find out what they would charge me for one of my medications. Of course, they wanted me to enter all my medications on the front end; fortunately I had declined to do so. Ka-ching! Big sales without any authorization from the user.
I haven’t given them any payment information, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Humana didn’t send them my credit card information when they created the unauthorized account. We’ll soon see.
Big insurance companies seem to be hot to get their beneficiaries to use internal pharmacies. They want to capture all that retail pharmacy big bux, and all’s fair in the pursuit of corporate profits — customer be damned! But the sleazy tactics I’ve seen them use to slam their customers into their internal pharmacy without consent are sordid even for the insurance industry.
I want a health insurance company I can trust. As my mother always said, though, “people in hell want icewater.”
—2p