My health insurance company asked me to fax documents. Who uses a fax anymore?

We have health insurance through my husband’s employer. It’s a pretty good plan, and customer service isn’t awful.

I can usually get through on the phone and it offers an email portal I can use for secure communications. It’s a resource where someone actually answers you back.

But that doesn’t mean dealing with the paperwork is any less frustrating.

When we recently needed a service recommended by a doctor, we couldn’t find an in-network provider who could offer a timely appointment, so we found one out-of-network.

To get the provider covered by the plan, we needed to submit some documents.

By fax. Fax? Who uses faxes anymore?

The insurer said that was the only way we could submit the documents that could ultimately save us thousands of dollars.

OK, I could fax the documents.

We recently canceled our rarely-used home fax line to save some cash. So I headed out to an office supply store to send the seven pages my insurance company requested.

It cost $15 dollars (I admit I didn’t shop around) and it was terribly slow, taking about two minutes to transmit one page. It somehow failed near the end, so I did it a second time. I received a confirmation that the send was successful.

At least I wasn’t charged twice.

After a few days, I called the insurance company to make sure it was received, but it wasn’t. They told me to fax it again.

Back to the office supply store. Another $15. Another confirmation page.

This time, it was received. But the whole experience made me wonder how many companies still use faxes as a required means of communication, and why? The consumer advocate in me wondered if it was trying to get consumers to give up with the sometimes-frustrating process. Indeed, not everyone can easily leave the house or afford to fork up dollars per page multiple times.

The most recent information I could find was a 2017 report by IDC, which offers research and advisory services about information technology and communications. It found that faxes remain an integral part of many businesses.

The report called faxes “secure” and “legally binding documents,” and said they are still common in finance, manufacturing, government and yes, healthcare.

Today, fax use is in decline, but it’s still out there, said IDC’s Keith Kmetz.

Companies use it for many reasons, including that for some, it’s “an entrenched workflow,” he said

You know, if it ain’t broke…

Others use it because they may not have a sophisticated tech infrastructure, or they want to make fax available for customers who need to use it, or they have compliance issues. And, he said, because it’s considered secure.

“Fax is established, trusted as a workflow and while digital alternatives have displaced a lot of fax, it remains in use and still important for many businesses and organizations to communicate,” he said. “While this attitude is changing, there still lingers a trust factor with some digital alternatives that may be considered `more hackable.’”

Plus, he said, it’s hard to completely eradicate an established and working technology. People have been talking about “paperless offices” since the 1970s, “yet we’re still printing hundreds of billions of pages every year in the U.S.,” he said.

Mitch Feather, a cybersecurity expert with Creative Associates in Madison, said generally speaking, a conventional paper-to-paper fax is not compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which covers privacy issues.

These days, he said, many or most businesses rely on digital fax solutions, whether cloud-based fax services or in-house fax servers. These would offer additional protections, he said.

While a business may receive a fax digitally, many consumers will still use an old-fashioned fax machine.

Requesting faxes comes at a price, Feather said, calling the practice “not particularly policyholder-friendly.”

After our job as a consumer was done and we got confirmation that the fax was received, we asked the health insurance company — as a reporter — why it still uses faxes.

It didn’t respond to multiple inquiries.

There you have it: a very unsatisfying answer to a frustrated consumer who is trying to make dealing with an already-frustrating process a little easier.

And in case you’re wondering, the insurance company approved our request for coverage.

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Karin Price Mueller may be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @KPMueller.