Drugs, Sex and Socialized Medicine (John Deere and Phone sex)

Bethany Morgan said she used a 1-800 number promoted by John Deere Health, an insurer that administers TennCare benefits, to order new prescription cards.

She said a message on that line prompted her to call another number that told her: “Welcome to an exciting way to go live one on one with hot horny girls who are waiting now to talk to you.”

“I’ve never encountered anything like this before,” Morgan told WATE-TV. “I thought I was going to get insurance cards, not a sex line. I didn’t hear all of it, I hung up.”

As the story turns out, they aren’t really trying to promote phone sex at taxpayer expense. The article reports:

Todd Florence, a spokesman for John Deere Health, released a statement Tuesday that said the company “regrets this mistake and is taking action to ensure the correct phone number is published in the future.”

He said the company had “mistakenly printed an incorrect telephone number that appeared in our newsletter for TennCare members.”

The phone number was previously a John Deere Health customer service number but had been discontinued in December and was not updated in the publication.

“The phone company that owned the 800 number then sold it to another business,” the statement said.

It seems that the marketing folks at TennCare are just as incompetent as the administrators they hire. Who says socialized medicine doesn’t work?

If I was buying, would I be getting health care from a tractor manufacturer or buying a tractor from a health care provider?

I'd have to think about that one, since I work at the largest John Deere C&F dealer in the western US. I don't know why or when Deere got into the insurance business, but it's been a good while. But I think most large corporations make insurance and financial services a part of their offerings in the name of diversity. Heck, a lot of the major equipment manufacturers even trade goods and services with one another. I like to yuk it up with the local CAT dealer (which my company used to own before switching brands a few years ago) about some of the goods that Deere designs and produces for CAT.

Things can get really twisted sometimes. All of Cat's technical publications are produced by a subsidiary of Deere, yet Deere outsources it's own publications from a third party who can produce with shorter lead times (but lower quality if you ask me).

Sometimes all the swapping back and forth can lead to embarrassing moments. A couple years ago I watched as one of our techs unloaded a brand new Deere wheel loader fresh from the factory, a specially built model that was going to be prepped and delivered on a demo to a mill that was a long time faithful CAT customer. From the tech's vantage point inside the cab he had a good view of the back of the machine's headlight housings, and where they usually were embossed with the words "John Deere", they had the CAT logo. Needless to say, those lights came off real quick. Cat dealer says they have seen similar bloopers on their machines. I'm thinking it's warehouse workers having some fun. Being union represented they have more time for fun & games than we out here who work our butts off (and earn better pay and benefits) putting the iron they send us into the dirt and keeping it there.

Oh - we don't get our group health plan through john Deere insurance, we use a locally based insurer and they pretty much kiss our butts when we call them with issues. And as for financial services, we own a bank (diversity, see), so a lot of that sort of business goes there.

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