A Prescription for Disaster

Just What the Doctor Ordered?

Okay, you might be asking, "What does this post have to do with Loft Boy?" I'll get to that in a completely roundabout way in a bit.

Suddenly, my family has found itself without health insurance. The publishing company that I had worked at for 13 years, decided to crash and burn in this horror story we call an economy. Well, it was more like a slow motion, from every angle, Michael Bay kind of crash and burn, truth be told. We had barely been hanging on for at least three years, so when I got the call that it was all over, of course I was completely shocked and appalled and wondered where the hell THAT had come from.

I've never been great at transitions.

The Loft Boy connection is this: when I first started penning Loftboy in the early 90's, I was unemployed then, too. I did have a job when I moved downtown, but of course the recession of the early 90's hit and once again, I found out that when economic times get bad, artists seem to be as valued as a hot dog vendor at a Hare Krishna picnic. I really hate recessions. Almost as much as I'm starting to hate art as a profession.

Okay, now back to the story.

So, I signed up for COBRA for the family. You know, that completely, outrageously price-gouging back-up health care plan you sign up for when you realize you are screwed since conservatives can't get on board to implement an affordable national single-payer health system in this country because that would make us all baby-killing communists?

Well, anyway for the low, low price of $1,250 a month, I could remain insured through the old company health plan. Oookay... since I was now going to pay that much, I was trying to think up elective surgeries I could sign up for. I really didn't need my appendix, so maybe I could have that taken out. Gall Bladder? Who needs a gall bladder?  I was determined to get some bang for my exceedingly large monthly health care buck.

Except I wasn't really signed up for COBRA. This is where the educational segment of the Loftboy blog kicks in. COBRA only works if the company you were laid off from is still in business and still has a health plan. If it folds, like mine did, and the old health plan is dropped, like ours was, there is no COBRA for you, grasshopper.

Of course, I didn't know that until I went to pay my premium for the second month and was told I had been canceled the first of the month (didn't you get the letter?). Mind you, I found this out twenty days after we had been canceled. Needless to say, I was glad I hadn't scheduled that gall bladder surgery.

But, that is another story.  This story is about prescription drugs, so forget that stuff.

Okay, so my wife needed to refill a prescription. Our old HMO, which shall go nameless (except for the initials, KP), who we have been with for over twenty years, suddenly wouldn't acknowledge our existence, and won't until we pay them scads of money. My wife apprised her old KP doc of our situation and, good guy that he is, he relented and told her the prescription refill would be at the KP pharmacy.

So, being the dutiful, unemployed husband that I am, I went to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription.

The guy behind the counter was cheerful and helpful and I had brought along my wife's old medical card, just in case they made a mistake and gave it to us at the member price and not the uninsured leper price. I handed him the card and he looked at it, input the info, looked again at his screen and said to me, "Do you know how much this prescription is without insurance?" I sensed this could not be a good development, but answered nonetheless, "No."

He shook his head and said, "It's $187.50"

"What about selling me a generic?"

"This is the generic."

Long, painful silence.

Now, considering that we had been paying $10.00 for this very same prescription just a month ago, this was a bit of an eye-opener. To the KP pharmacy guy's credit, (because he could see that I was about to start weeping like John Boehner at a "Field of Dreams" Film Festival), he kind of leaned in and said, "You know, you don't have to get it filled here. You can go to Wal Mart or someplace else. Shop it around."

"I can do that? This isn't a trap?"

"Sure, you can do that."

"Well, okay then. I'll do that."

 "Okay."

So, he printed out the prescription and I went storming out of the pharmacy without even the vaguest sliver of an idea where I was going to go to refill this thing. In a fit of desperation, I got into my car and remembered, as if in a dream, that there was a large box store that shall remain nameless (but the initials are Costco), that had a pharmacy close to me. And I'm a card-carrying, bona fide member of that club. So, I traveled there as fast as I could because if I didn't come back with the pills, my wife would have thought that I had put monetary considerations above her health. That this was true, is kind of nit-picking.

 So, I screamed into the parking lot of the nameless store with the initials Costco, and at a dead run, while dodging the amazingly giant carts filled with metric tons of bean dip and three-story boxes of Captain Crunch, blazed through the entrance of said store, then jogged another 15 minutes or so until I finally reached the pharmacy.

Breathless, I handed the guy at the pharmacy counter the prescription and asked, "Can you fill this?"

He looked at it and said, "Sure."

He then looked at his screen and looked at the prescription again and asked, "Did you really pay $187.50 for this?"

I said, no that's why I came here. How much is it?

Well, what I thought he said was $49.00. Which considering that I had just saved about $140.00, made it a pretty darn good day for me. So, I said to him, "$49.00? That's a lot better than $187.50."

Then he looked straight at me and said something that if I didn't have the proof of the receipt right in front of me, I still wouldn't believe.

He said, "$49.00? No, I said $4.49."

$4.49

My good old ex-health care provider was going to sell me that same prescription at a 2,300% mark up over what Costco (oops, I let it slip out, darn it) ended up charging me.

four-frickin-forty-nine.

I would supply a moral to this story, but this story has nothing to do with morals, so I won't.

Suffice to say, the next time I go to my new health care provider, I might just pick up a 50 lb bag of Doritos on the way out.

Rivera Restaurant • 1050 S. Flower St. #102 • Los Angeles, CA 90015

Recently, my wife and I were invited to the restaurant Rivera in downtown L.A. for a good friend's birthday. Frankly, I had never heard of it, but that's not really unusual. We're not exactly foodies, concentrating our activities mainly on paying for things like groceries and braces. Anyway, we don't get to eat out as much as we used to and rarely at dimly lit restaurants that tout Modern Latin Cuisine in Los Angeles (unless you count that Taco Bell I recently went to that had the power outage.)

Honestly, I generally don't go to restaurants that have a Philosophy. Now, don't confuse Philosophy with attitude, even though I've found that if a restaurant has a Philosophy link on its website, it generally follows that attitude might just tag along for the culinary ride. And considering that it's situated in the newly tony South Park section of Downtown L.A., I was doubly wary.

So, with a bit of trepidation, I took the metro and walked down the few blocks it took to get to Rivera, remembering the good old days when the tumbleweeds rolled by in this section of town at night and you generally ran, not walked to your destination and the only Modern Latin Cuisine around was found on a roach coach.

When I walked in, it was no surprise that it was:
A: Dimly lit.
B: Was filled with many people. At least I think it was. It was kind of hard to see.
C: Had a spectacular interior and lighting scheme that obviously had been designed by a person with macular degeneration.

Generally, it looked like a a pretty classy joint. I immediately felt a bit uncomfortable. Now, this is not entirely the fault of the restaurant. You are talking to a guy, who in his THIRTIES, went to a fine rooftop restaurant in downtown L.A. where they brought me sorbet to cleanse my palette before the next course and I promptly told the waiter that I hadn't ordered any ice cream, thank you and he could take it back NOW.

I had never actually seen a waiter shiver like that before.

Anyway, our party was seated in the Sangre Dining Room which was small and comfortable and surrounded by, what looked like backlit golden glass bricks filled with liquid. One of our party, of course, asked what that was all about. Turns out, we were surrounded by bottles of tequila. But, not just any tequila, it was tequila that had been distilled from an agave farm personally hand-picked by the chef down in Mexico, who bought it to make his own exclusive brand of tequila. So, how much per shot? Oh, no, you don't get to touch this stuff on the wall unless you are a member of their exclusive Signature Tequila Club, where you get a lock and key for your two bottles of tequila and can come in and unlock it when you choose.

Now, I don't want to judge. I'm guessing that to some joining the Signature Tequila Club and getting two bottles for a mere $2,500 is a bargain, but I keep thinking that for that amount I could buy 1,250 bottles of Two Buck Chuck and stay pretty wasted for close to three years (okay, maybe six months). When you break it down, it's only $1,250 per bottle, which is only three times as much as I paid for my first car. But, I mean seriously, for that kind of dough I had better be conversing with a naked Che Guevara riding a unicorn after a couple shots. Hell, I'd better be naked and doing Che Guevara on a unicorn after a couple of shots of tequila that precious.

Anyway, I ordered a beer.

Also, what I really liked as we pored through the various treats was that you could call a phone number on the bottom of the menu, where you could get an explanation from the head chef, John Rivera Sedlar  as to what your appetizer or entree was all about. After actually calling, we were frankly disappointed that it was a recording and didn't connect directly with the chef, who we pictured sweatily working in the kitchen and yelling at line chefs while being interrupted by constant phone calls inquiring about the caracoles (No, you fool. Snails do NOT taste like chicken!)

Overall, the appetizers were tasty and small, but I kind of got the hint after learning about the tequila that we weren't in The Cheesecake Factory anymore, Toto. So, alas, there were to be no giant onion blossoms tonight.

The entrees, once again were tasty and small. However, before we dug into them, the waiter had to go around and explain to each and every one of us exactly what the origin of our dish was and how it was made (I'm assuming that they have little faith that anybody actually bothers to call the dial-a-chef number at the bottom of the menu.) They had also stenciled sayings on our plates using ground cumin. I wish I could tell you what my saying was, but between trying to process that and the extended dissertation of my entree, my brain had turned to gazpacho blanco and all memory of that five minutes has been wiped as clean as Jason Bourne starring in Memento.

I had the pollo breast, which had obviously been hand-picked by the chef from a farm in Mexico that specializes in tasty, moist, midget chickens. My wife had a dish with duck in it that she claimed was delicious. I could not verify said claim because she finished it before I could rudely snatch any of it off of her plate.

Overall, things had gone fairly well, but as the evening wore on, the waiters seemed to lose interest in us and the service started to become a bit spotty. They were especially annoyed because we had the audacity to bring our own cake and have them put a candle in it and then cut it afterwards. They disappeared for ever longer periods of time, most likely spitting on our cake and cutting it with tetanus-laden, rusty knives. It also probably didn't help that they had automatically included a 20% tip (for a party of seven, mind you), so they really didn't have much incentive to give a flying conquistador whether we were happy or not.

I don't know how much the meal came to, because the wife of the birthday boy paid for the entire dinner, for which I am eternally grateful and will thank her until the end of time. I'm pretty sure it came to more than fifty bucks.

Overall, Rivera was pretty much what I expected. Beautiful interior, pricey food, small portions and $1,250 bottles of tequila.

And not one unicorn in sight.

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