Blue Cross Blue Shield Fax Number

Blue Cross Blue Shield is not one company

Each Blue plan is a separate company that licenses the Blue Cross and Blue Shield name. The licensee statement appears in the footer of every Blue plan’s own site, in this form: the plan “is the trade name of [the insurer], an independent licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.”

That is why a single national fax number does not exist and cannot be published. Your claims, your appeals, your authorizations, and your records are held by the specific company that issued your coverage, whether that is Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Blue Shield of California, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, or any of the others. A number belonging to another Blue plan is not a slow route to yours; it is a different company.

How to find your plan’s fax number

In order of reliability:

• The letter you are responding to. A denial, a request for information, or an authorization notice carries the routing for that specific matter, and it beats any general number.
• The back of your member ID card. The three-letter prefix before your member number identifies your Blue plan, and the customer service number reaches it.
• Your plan’s own website, reached from bcbs.com through Find My Local Plan rather than by searching for “Blue Cross fax number”.
• Customer service by phone, asking them to read the fax number back to you and noting who you spoke to.

The common failure here is faxing to a Blue plan in the wrong state. It looks like the right brand and is the wrong company, and nobody tells you.

What Blue plan members send

The paperwork that moves by fax once you have the right number:

• An appeal of a denied claim or denied prior authorization, with the denial letter attached
• A grievance about service or access
• An authorization letting a spouse, an adult child, or an attorney speak to the plan on your behalf
• A request for your own claims history or health information held by the plan
• Coordination-of-benefits paperwork, when two plans cover the same person

A denial letter plus an appeal form and a doctor’s letter runs four to six pages.

How to fax your Blue plan without a fax machine

Create a free FaxTerra account with an email address, upload your document as a PDF or as phone photos, enter your plan’s fax number, and send. Small documents send free within your monthly free pages, and you get a delivery confirmation that timestamps the send against your appeal deadline.

See how to send a fax for accepted files and page limits, how to fax an insurance claim for the general appeal process, and the Anthem guide for the largest Blue licensee, which publishes some of its state numbers openly.