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.