Monday, July 03, 2006

Grumpy Old Man Rant #4,942

My doctor put me on a once-daily diabetes drug called Actos last December and my Caremark prescription insurance has covered it every month when I go to the local pharmacy for a refill.
Until today.
I took my last Actos yesterday.
Today, the pharmacist informed me that Caremark will no longer pay for Actos refills at the drugstore level. From now on, I have to get it in 90-day quantities by mail from Caremark.
This is what they did with a couple of other drugs and in both cases the mail-order arrangement represented a fairly substantial savings.
My complaint is that in none of these three cases did they give me advance warning. No e-mail or even a notification to the pharmacist saying, "This is your last pharmacy refill. After this, you have to go mail-order."
No, they just shut the client off with no advance notice.
And, since I've switched doctors in the past month and my new doc refuses to phone prescriptions in for mail-order, I have to snail-mail his prescription to Caremark and wait for them to snail-mail my Actos to me, which involves a turnaround of maybe a week or two.
In the meantime, I'm twisting in the wind.
Fortunately, I'm not sufficiently fucked up that this idiocy would put me into the hospital, but it would serve the morons right if their policy resulted in them having to pick up the tab for an expensive ER visit or hospitalization.

3 comments:

Totsie said...

A dangerous oversight on their part.

ps - Is Pete back?

The Oracle said...

Yep. See the July 4 post. And thanks for asking.

Anonymous said...

Oracle,

You're lucky that it only took 1-2 weeks to receive your meds. I'm waiting for 3 meds and have been for 3 weeks now. They have no explanation as to why and can't even tell me when I'll get them!