Thursday, January 04, 2007

You Talking to Me?

Once again, I am having pharmacy/insurance issues.

Yesterday, I went in to pick up two prescriptions, certain that the troubles I had last month had been resolved, not because I am a wishful thinker but because I was told [personification alert!] by my insurance company [make that my secondary insurance company] that they'd been resolved.

Note: If you had trouble following that sentence, you have only the slightest intimation of how convoluted is the world of my insurance coverage.

In any event, yesterday I was asked to pay something like $250 for one of my prescriptions. It turns out that the pharmacist had billed my primary insurance company, whose prescription-drug benefit I had already exhausted.

I explained that both prescriptions should instead be billed to my secondary insurance company, whose information should have been stored in my online records but inexplicably wasn't.

I didn't have time to wait for the billing to be sorted out (a process the pharmacist estimated would take 20 minutes, which I find quaint in its naiveté), so I left my secondary insurance card and said I'd be back today.

When I arrived this evening, the following sign was posted on the pharmacy counter, in both English and Spanish:

Dear Customers
Please let us know about changes in insurance policy
before you place the order for medicine.
This will help us to serve you better
Thank You!!

(This should go without saying, but the grammar and punctuation errors are not mine.)

In this case, I guess "serve you better" means "charge you only $132.55 instead of $250 for your anti-cancer drug."

That hissing sound you hear?

That's me seething.

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