Public Service Announcement

This is a public service announcement.

If you have an expensive drug, a high insurance deductible, a mail order specialty pharmacy, a very nice Co-pay assistance program, and a health savings account, know one thing.

This is the order of billing:

1. First billed: Your husband’s HSA card, because it is on auto-pay.

2. Then they bill: Anything else.

Even if you say, “Be sure to put any payments on the two co-pay assistance cards, and don’t touch the HSA.” Doesn’t matter, because you explained that to the human, but the computer does the billing, and the computer taps into the auto pay card immediately, even if it is your husband’s card used for his dinky little non-specialty stuff.

Luckily Gary did something that caused me to look at the HSA and I discovered to my horror that my year’s deductible had been sucked out of there (instead of handed over to the co-pay program). I spoke to a very nice man at Express Scripts pharmacy and he explained that auto-pay doesn’t play well with others.

I would have been very calm and mindful, but regrettably this happened after Gary got me up at one am with a false alarm saying that he had lost his medicine. Happily, he found his meds, I found the deductible issue, and everything got straightened out eventually after one sleepless night. 

I’m trying to turn this into a positive by raising awareness of the evil that is the auto-pay pharmacy card. FYI.

Comments

[KC]

Auuuugh. This is one of the many reasons why I loathe autopay things. (another being that if they make a mistake in billing, like an "oops we added two zeros" glitch, that can do Bad Things before you get it detangled.) Congratulations on sorting it out!

[theQueen]

KC- I still love auto-pay; I just can't have it for the mail-order drugs. I've never seen them add extra zeroes.

[KC]

We've been charged things that were drastically the wrong amount before (presumably a data entry mistake?) but did not have things set on autopay, so we could challenge them before paying. (depending on the entity, it can be Very Challenging to retrieve your money once you've already paid them, unless you use credit for everything - or very easy) We've also heard plenty of horror stories from other people; a pipe bursting meant that their water bill for the month was in the thousands instead of below $100 (which, if you contact the city, they'll usually either partly refund it or at least set you up with a payment plan, but if it empties your bank account, then you've got all the bounced-payment problems to deal with as well); someone failing to run things through insurance [or glitched things when they ran it through insurance such that no insurance was applied] which meant they got charged for the whole amount (we've also had this happen, but again, not autopay, we caught it).

That said, the main reason we don't do autopay is that if we did autopay we'd never actually look at the actual numbers and catch when the internet company randomly hikes their rates or adds inapplicable charges (no we do *not* rent a modem from you and never have...). Physically reviewing the bills saves us money every year or two - although not usually *much* money.

(which, incidentally, is why I am very strongly against legal "you agree to not be part of a class-action lawsuit" clauses in terms and conditions and would like those to be illegal: it sets companies up to do a slight not-necessarily-legal bleed on all their customers/employees/etc. As long as it's a small enough number that it's not worth personally taking action for almost all people, and as long as they don't get charged by the state independently (which takes kind of a lot, from what I gather?), then the company gets all/most of the money (because individual suits would only bring those individual refunds/costs); whereas with the Fear of Class-Action Lawsuits, then there's more motivation to not do illegal-cheaty-but-small things in a broad manner.)(and tons of companies already do a lot of illegal or semi-illegal cheaty-but-small things. So I'd like to reduce probable gains from them.)

[TheQueen]

KC - I love class action lawsuits. I got new siding on my house (I had siding so bad there was a suit) and I got my latest set of dogs, McDonnell and Douglas, because Gary was in a class action lawsuit against Mac. Oh, and I just was in one with my actual current employer, but I haven’t seen any funds from that yet. Even if it’s a small amount, without it there would have been zero. If the lawyers are doing all the work, and I do nothing, let them take the bulk.

[KC]

I don't like frivolous lawsuits of any kind, but class-action lawsuits for things that need class action lawsuits, I'm totally in favor of, because no, we are not going to sue an airline for a fraudulent fee or for price-fixing or for whatever, but companies need to know that if they do things badly enough they have a good chance of getting non-trivially smacked for it.

I don't know what the remedy for signing away your rights on EULAs and Terms and Conditions is, though - getting laws passed so that it's illegal to not allow people to opt out of those clauses? Not sure. (it also bugs me when hospitals try to have you sign away rights, for obvious reasons. Hi, I'm in the ER, and also the next-nearest ER has the same privacy-violating or otherwise-problematic clauses in their bulk legal sign-here statement: do I *really* have much freedom of choice here?)

Another thing I've seen notice of, but, not having immediate connections to nursing homes at this time, haven't personally hit, is that some/many nursing homes now have "we will not sue you for anything" as a clause to the entry contact, which to me looks like a serious elder-abuse situation waiting to happen. If all the nursing homes end up having it (as most software and service EULAs now have the no-class-action - Amazon et al)(and there isn't really any motivation to *not* have it - avoiding lawsuits: cheaper; if you don't lose any business because it's just a standard clause: no penalty) then you don't have any choice about it, if you need a nursing home? (or an entry-level job and all the employers in the area have a similar no-sue clause, or renting cheap housing in a mostly-corporation-run area, etc.)

But I am not optimistic about this getting legally repaired any time soon. (but if you know how, or who one would contact, I'd love to hear it!)