Week of Insurance Weirdness
And everyone tries to help!

Hey! I have a pretty good excuse!
I ran out of time.

Time this week has been largely devoted to an intensifying schedule of physical therapy exercises.

But that’s not all, folks.
An amazing amount of additional time has been taken by what I had imagined would be a minor insurance correction.

A recent change in a prescription (from twice a day to once a day) had escaped my notice. Nobody told me.
I only discovered the change when the normal pharmacy notification hadn’t arrived. I had to go through an online app to discover that there was a problem.

So I called the pharmacist.
She discovered my insurance company had told the pharmacy, told them electronically, that a refill would not be covered so soon.
They just don’t allow for doubling up on dosages.

All understandable. Mixups happen. So she and I just needed to contact the insurance company, right?

Wrong, foolish mortals!!

I ended up in multiple conversations, some online and some by phone, with my doctor’s office, the pharmacist, and several representatives of the insurance company.
They all tried to get my prescription to me. Even the insurance folks.

Here’s the weird thing:
The final insurance representative explained the hangup.
Their policy is that overriding a coverage decision will be tolerated only once a year.

Sometime earlier this year they had overridden another coverage decision concerning my health.
The representative could not explain what that previous override involved.

They will cover the prescription I need, but only the week after I should have it. That’s when I would have been out had I known to go to once a day.
Eventually, my doctor decided that skipping a few days would probably not represent a serious health risk.

So I had invested an extreme amount of time over what turned out to be a minor medical issue, combined with an absurd insurance policy.

My imagination now takes over.
Are others with the same coverage facing the same limits on correcting mistakes?
Are any of those patients facing more serious consequences because insurance companies will only correct one mistake each year?

Just one way our for-profit health system often goes bonkers.