Opinion: Want to stop being a customer? Then your call is not important.

To the editor: Thanks to Barry Goldman for giving me a great laugh by writing about his experience trying to get Blue Cross to stop billing him once his wife turned 65 and became eligible for Medicare. Oh, yes, all of us have been through the joy of traversing customer service. (“A natural experiment proves it — ‘service providers’ make it easy to pay and hard to stop,” Opinion, Nov. 21)

Goldman’s article was so well written that I felt I was on the phone with him. He had great faith in the system until he discovered the absolute truth: Your call is really not that important to them. They mostly hope you will lose patience and hang up, perhaps never to contact them again. And, for a while, they will continue to charge you for services no longer needed.

I applaud Goldman for his tenacity. I have some advice for him: Wait until you navigate Medicare. That will be fun too.

Connie Woodson, Studio City

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To the editor: Goldman’s op-ed article about changing his wife’s insurance ballooned my blood pressure. Not because I was upset by what he said, but because his story is so reminiscent of the agony I endure when I try to contact a big entity to get anything resolved.

Conservative think tanks would claim that the solution to this problem (and most others) is free-market competition. Tell me how that would work here — where might one go to find a competitor that deals with customer issues more effectively?

In my experience, they don’t exist.

Roger Bourke, Alta, Utah

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