Yikes....no wonder it is difficult for physicians to ensure and encourage patients to be sure to fill their prescriptions and take their medications, one person's ordeal ...BD
I went to my pharmacy to get another prescription filled, an act that’s become so routine for most of us, we go through the drive-in window to get our pills. Only this time, things were different. My health provider’s card, which used to assure me of a generally reasonable price, was rejected. I had to either pay full price, which was so outrageous I could hardly believe my eyes, or straighten it out with my provider, which quit doing business the usual way two days before.
If I paid full price, the pills cost 10 times more, I kid you not. A $10 drug was suddenly more than $100. So I decided to straighten it out with my health provider.
Go to round five of voicemail hell back to my provider where, after a good half hour, I punched into my cell phone everything a robot asked about me: my S.S. #, my H.M.O. number, my birth date, my mother’s maiden name. When the robot was satisfied, I had only three more circles of hell to go through before I found a human, who asked me the exact same information the robot had. After ascertaining that I was really me, she listened to my problem and said that she couldn’t possibly change my address, because such a change had to come on a form provided by the employment benefits office of my workplace.
I decided that instead of lowering myself deeper and deeper into the bureaucratic muck they call healthcare in this country, I’d go through unorthodox channels and beg someone in a nearby office to find this “benefits” representative for me, and have him respond.
..... he e-mailed me a hugely nonsensical form full of inexplicable language that I was supposed to sign, mail back to him, after which he’d forward my address change to my health provider, so that they could forward it to their spin-off drug company, so that they could send me a card, so that I could pay for my drug what I was supposed to pay in the first place. Not to mention the fact that this workplace “benefits” guy should have done this months before when I entered my change of address in every official document.
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