Insurance
Last Monday I went to the doctor.
That is a very simple sentence that does not begin to describe the hours of agony in preparation for this doctor's appointment.
I made this appointment last year, when I went to last year's doctor's appointment. I managed to get by the whole year seeing the doctor only two other times, when I was panicked that I had some sort of horrific neurological disease because my arm kept being numb. Stupid arm. Turns out it was stress and muscle tension, and the 8 hours I spent the night before the MRI pooping relentlessly in what was, quite literally, bowel-gripping terror, were just a huge waste of time when I should have been writing my final paper for senior seminar.
See, doctors and me, we just don't get along. I am deeply, completely, utterly phobic of them. I am perfectly happy to see them once a year to get certain prescriptions refilled and certain squishy bits prodded and pronounced acceptable.
That last sentence was an utter lie.
A more accurate sentence would be "I am deeply terrified of seeing doctors at any time, but I make myself go once a year because certain prescriptions need to be refilled and certain squishy bits need to be prodded and pronounced acceptable."
But I managed to go! I managed to go and get squishy bits prodded and even let them suck some of my precious blood out of my veins! I managed to go and behave well and even make very small and stupid jokes and keep my pulse rate under 120! I have informed my doctor that my resting heart rate is about 60 bpm, and she is just going to have to believe me because she will never see it under 100.
And at the end of all the poking and prodding and unpleasantness, I managed to walk out (walking! on my own feet! without shaking horribly!) with a prescription for Seasonale.
Seasonale, for those of you who do not pay attention to pink-colored flowery advertisements in the paper and on Yahoo! sidebars and on TV and everywhere else for that matter (where the hell have you been hiding without knowing about Seasonale?!) is the birth control pill that lets you have four periods a year. 4! A year!
This is a huge improvement if, like me, you get at least 4 periods a year that involve cramps so bad you think you are going to give birth to Jesus H. Christ right there on the toilet, right before you pass out (and you didn't even know you were pregnant). So having 4 periods a year reduces the number of potentially agonizing periods to one. One I can handle. Sort of. Whimpering may be involved.
Yay Seasonale! Yay prescriptions! Yay me for managing to go to the doctor!
So Monday evening I take my brand-new, hard-earned prescription to the drugstore. I hand over my brand-new insurance card (my very first own insurance policy that is mine! At least my job gives me that!) and my brand-new prescription to the pharmacist. She looks it up in the system and enters my information and looks puzzled.
"Your insurance won't cover this."
"What? It's a birth-control pill."
"Yeah....but for some reason it's coming back as denied."
"Huh. Well, how much is it if I pay privately?"
"Oof. It's an expensive one."
"How much?"
"$125."
Granted, this is $125 for a three-month supply (because you only have 4 periods! a year!) and so is slightly less unreasonable than it looks at first gasp. But...I mean...damn.
"Well, I'm just going to have to raise hell with them about that. Stupid insurance."
Indeed.
She gives me my prescription and my card back, and I go home to research this situation.
It turns out that my pharmacist was slightly mistaken. Seasonale is covered, but since it's a three-month supply, you have to pay three times the normal copay.
And since Seasonale is a Tier-3 drug, a non-generic, non-plan drug that I nonetheless need due to my reluctance to give birth to more than 4 Jesus H. Christs a year, my copay is....$40.
Do the fucking math.