As many of you know, my 90-year-old mom receives hospice services in her memory care facility. I handle her mail.
This week’s load included a formal, oversized envelope from her Pharmacy Benefit Manager…
‘You are wasting your money. You are making bad decisions about your medications. You need to let us help you correct your mistakes.’
Gee, that seemed harsh.
First a quick reality check. In her assisted living facility, as at most, the staff dispenses medication as needed from prepared unit dose packets. The staff handling the drugs have a computerized record keeping system and make sure each resident gets the correct pill at the right time. The PBM (you know, the groups with “Chase” on TV telling you how great they are) wants my mom to get mail order 90 day supplies of her drug which she would have to handle and take at the correct time.
Not a good idea. (Actually, a deciding factor for persuading my mom to go to assisted living was a pile of loose pills in her dresser at home.)
Ironically, the tone of that PBM mailing didn’t surprise me.
Each day my mom gets numerous requests from charities. Some are well known, many obscure and a number of which aren’t even charities in the IRS sense.
Having spent a big chunk of my career raising money via mailings, well, my curiosity forces me to open and read a bunch of them. The new trend? Instead of asking for money they DEMAND MONEY IMMEDIATELY!!!
It’s always an EMERGENCY and you MUST DO YOUR PART!!! The forces of evil – sometime from the left, sometimes from the right, sometimes everywhere – stand at the cusp of victory or annihilation or whatever.
Yes, part of this probably stems from the polarized place America is today. Polite discussion died a while back and now anyone not 100% on your side is an enemy deserving a vicious demise.
Need an example? View any Donald Trump TV appearance in its unedited form. Or appearances by his press secretary or his Secretary of Defense or his immigration assassin or anyone working in the administration who is allowed near a TV camera.
The other factor, I think, is the need to stand out in a noisy world. If you know your potential donors get 20 appeals a day, well, a letter quoting an old Ray Bradbury story about the beginning of summer for kids doesn’t ring the bell. Attacks and doom mongering get noticed.
In the trade a lot of blind appeal letters consider victory a 2% response rate. Add-in modern printing and postage costs and you could be spending $45.00 to make $50.00.
Now I’m wondering what I’ll find in my mom’s mail next week.
Glenn Koenen