Back in September I got a letter from Walgreens telling me that starting January 1, 2012 they would no longer be able to fill prescriptions under the Express Scripts\/Federated Insurance plan. It was a very…diplomatic…way of saying, “We’re terribly sorry that we care so much more about your health than your insurance company does. But we needed to tell you the truth.”<\/p>\n
There was never a single notification from the insurance company about this change.<\/p>\n
Bob took the letter to work to tell them, “Hey this shitty insurance fucking sucks!”<\/p>\n
Or at least, that’s what I WANTED<\/i><\/b> him to say. He probably worded it more like, “Hey, my wife got this letter and we’re probably not the only ones.”<\/p>\n
After an exchange between work people and insurance people (who claimed this was the first they’d heard of it) we were told the two parties were actually in contract negotiations and it would more than likely be resolved by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
Fast forward to January.<\/p>\n
I called in a prescription for refill. I went to pick it up. The clerk asked to see my insurance card and then had to go talk to somebody else. He came back and said, “We don’t take Express Scripts anymore.” I had to pay retail price. Fortunately it was fairly cheap as far as drugs go, but it was still bullshit.<\/p>\n
I’m just glad I don’t currently have an active prescription for Topamax that cost $200-some a month. If I still had five prescriptions to fill at one time, I would have had a complete mental breakdown in the middle of the pharmacy.<\/p>\n
The same day in the mail, I got another letter from Walgreens. It was another, “We’re sorry we love you more than your shitty insurance does. Here’s a list of possible replacement pharmacies in the area. We’ll help you transition to somebody your shitty insurance will allow you to use.”<\/p>\n
Bob’s taking the news to work. And I’m requesting a list of pharmacies our insurance will “allow” me to use. Because I might only have one fairly cheap prescription to fill right now, but I don’t see that always being the case.<\/p>\n
I’m pretty sure the next change our insurance makes they’re going to tell me I can’t see the doctors I want to see. They already don’t cover my psychiatrist.<\/p>\n
Denying access to pharmacies (one of the biggest…the<\/i> biggest?…in the country) falls right in the same vein as controlling which doctors you see.<\/p>\n
It’s bullshit.<\/p>\n
Complete bullshit.<\/p>\n
—<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in September I got a letter from Walgreens telling me that starting January 1, 2012 they would no longer be able to fill prescriptions under the Express Scripts\/Federated Insurance plan. It was a very…diplomatic…way of saying, “We’re terribly sorry that we care so much more about your health than your insurance company does. But we needed to tell you the truth.” There was never a single notification from the insurance company about this change…. Keep reading…And I didn’t even get flowers first…<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[103,52,25,51,81],"tags":[225],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-because-i-am-a-fucking-adult","category-haphazard-tirades","category-health","category-im-about-to-start-hucking-rocks-at-people","category-scars-souvenirs","tag-225","content-layout-excerpt-thumb"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8964,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/8964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.getalifebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}