I know I am the most fortunate of all of those with MS, even in the way I pay for my medication. The co-pay assistance pays my deductible, which is now $4,500 just for me, and I pay nothing. No complaints here.
Remember when Express Scripts billed my husband's Health Savings card instead charging the deductible to the co-pay assistance cards? I made a special effort to be gracious, because what am I going to do, be petty in a situation when I am clearly the beneficiary?
Well, evidently there is an additional nuance to the billing. This is how the process is supposed to go:
- Bill any card in the family with auto-pay turned on. (Gary has turned off his auto-pay now).
- Bill the co-pay 'pharmacy' card, which responds to the billing by paying a smidgen and then crediting the co-pay 'credit' card with the remainder. (They got as far as this step, this time.)
- Bill the 'credit' card, which has a huge pile of money sitting on it now, as if I had accidentally sent in a $4,500 payment for a $45 credit card statement. (They skipped this step, regrettably.)
That left me with minus $4,500 in my health savings account, but at least a nice juicy $4,500 credit on my co-pay assistance card.
Of course, to understand all this I spent quite some time on the phone with the co-pay people. It was a while before I felt quite in command of the situation. I called Express Scripts and nudged them into step 3. It was only four more days and one more phone call before everything was resolved.
What has surprised me is how pleasant I've been to everyone so far. Believe me, if this were my money alone, I would have been using the "tone" by now -- the clipped patrician tone that says my servants have been found wanting and I may send them back to the poorhouse. However, because I'm the one getting the charity (it was painful to write "co-pay assistance" above), I've been nice to everyone.
I need to remember I'm in debt to others all the time, not just when I'm getting financial assistance.
That is bewildering, but I am glad it worked out for you eventually! :-) (and that is an interesting psychological/philosophical reflection)
Posted by: KC | May 11, 2019 at 03:03 PM
KC- It was frustrating, but as I say, free money knocks the indignation right out of you.
Posted by: theQueen | May 11, 2019 at 10:10 PM
It doesn't always knock the indignation right out of me; sometimes "free" just plain isn't worth it (my mother loves rebates; I would rather buy toothpaste without a rebate than wrestle with a company that's betting on making it enough of a pain to get a rebate that people will be tricked into buying their toothpaste-with-rebate and then give up on the rebate eventually - which makes me mad, not grateful), and sometimes "free" triggers a sort of vaguely defensive mechanism, if it's served up in an adequately superior/patronizing manner.
That said, $4,500 is enough to pay a very, very good hourly rate for quite a few phone calls, and the medication is "worth it" to you, which makes a difference. :-) *And* it sounds like they're not trying to swindle you or make it so it's hard enough that fewer people will do it (our insurance company and the medication appeals process and appeals delays: good "business", extremely bad ethics). Slightly incompetent in the face of a complicated system: easier to encounter cheerfully than malice!
Posted by: KC | May 12, 2019 at 11:28 AM
KC - I would only use a rebate if it were for something I was buying already, like a printer. I almost never use coupons, because they’re almost never for what I want to eat.
Posted by: TheQueen | May 12, 2019 at 07:08 PM