#92 “The insurance company made me go to an ‘independent medical exam’ where they choose a doctor for me to see to evaluate how sick I am.”
“I was on medical leave for many months due to a disabling chronic illness. It started off okay as Facebook paid me disability leave. I found that dealing with HR and the insurance company was really hard in general. After a certain point of being on disability leave, the insurance company Facebook works with changed the requirements (without telling me) on how they determined if I was qualified to be paid while taking disability leave. The insurance company made me go to an 'independent medical exam' where they choose a doctor for me to see to evaluate how sick I am. The closest doctor they had was in Tacoma and I don't have a car, so they paid a taxi driver to drive me there and back. I wondered why there weren't any qualified doctors in Seattle to do this exam. When I went to this independent medical exam, I saw the doctor for less than 20 minutes, and somehow his determination of my health was worth more than 6 months of multiple doctor's records and labwork. So Facebook stopped paying me after that.
Because I needed a paycheck, I decided to go back to work even though I wasn't ready and my doctor didn't think I was ready either. I emailed Facebook's HR and told them the date when I could start working again. I didn't start working until 1.5 months after the date I wanted to come back because HR wouldn't get back to me in a timely manner. They would go a full week without responding to my emails and when I would email them for an update, they'd tell me they were busy with their other work. I missed out on a month and half of pay because HR failed to do their job efficiently. I felt so isolated. Coming back to work was also really hard because of things under Facebook's control. I had been locked out of accounts that I needed to do my job. Facebook kept asking me to re-sign contracts 3 or 4 times because they had written them wrong. They sent out an email to my wider team (~150 people) that showed everyone's stats on a particular job requirement. I was the only person on the team who's stat showed a zero. I felt like this outed me as having been on leave on still having special accommodations at work. And HR still has a consistent pattern of not responding in timely manner or having a firm grasp on the status or progress for each person's medical leave / accommodation case.
And during all of this, Facebook underpaid me on two separate periods. I was underpaid for a total of 2.5 months, and I was the one who had to bring it to their attention. Who knows what would have happened if I wasn't paying closer attention to my paystubs.”
