every trip to the pharmacy is an annoyed thought experience for me. i go and pick up the family meds. and drop off the ones that require action (mostly adderal-ly things).
last sunday, one of the adderals was not fillable until March 2nd per insurance as conveyed by the tech. i went home and got asked wtf, the prior one was filled 40 days ago for a 30 day supply. she is out. go back. so i went back monday, same tech remembered me. explained how I understand the insurance block for a 30 day period, but this one was filled 40 days ago? consulted with the pharmacist and then the answer was that the doc would need to get it pre-authorized? which would lead to a race between that going through and March 2nd. in any case, the extended release adderal has been missing from home for 3 days and I will try to pick it up tomorrow.
now repeat that or similar with…5 meds a month. yay me!
eta that the people at the pharmacy are solid. it’s the insurance interaction that baffles me. which hurts my feelings as a cog in the machine that is our healthcare system. i mean, CVS/Caremark makes me wistful for the competence we were eventually able to coax out of express scripts. (read that again)
I asked my Shipt shopper for 2 apples. Got 2 3-pound bags of apples.
Oh well, I made a ton of apple chips for the first time and my partner loved it, said I need to make them all the time now. I know what I’ll be doing regularly next fall.
I was never able to coax anything resembling competence from Express scripts, and literally got some drugs from my boss’s wife who was visiting India (where they are cheap and OTC) because it took so long for Express Scripts to authorize a refill. I’ve been okay with CVS Caremark. Annoyed at what they are charging me in places, but at least I can get stuff.
to be fair, we had 6 years with ESI and they maybe were competent in the last 2 only. but now getting used to the new one and it sucks.
ESI was originally sub-terrible. as in not shipping important drugs on time. so then a flare up occurred that led to a 2 day IP stay. not cost effective, right? and the customer service was hiring from the “not so skilled” segment of applicants. but eventually they found their way.
now we have CVS bungling everything relating to approvals coming through on time and hangups galore.
Leaving a voicemail in response to an email:
Right: [hang up without leaving vm and send email instead]
Less Wrong: Hi twig, this is John Doe. I got your email. Can you call when you get a minute? My phone number is 123-456-7890. Again that’s 123-456-7890. Thanks.
Extremely Wrong: Hi twig, this is John Doe at blur of indistinguishable ###. I need to talk to you right away. You emailed me to ask X but I can’t decide because I was worried about [irrelevant thing] and if that’s the case then [even more irrelevant thing]. I was thinking about this because [long irrelevant story].
Yeah, bread seems to have gone up a lot. I think it was around $2.50 here a couple years ago. Now it’s normally $4, but it is pretty common to see it on sale for $3.50.
I can buy bread from a local baker for $5. It’s amazing! For about three days. And then it goes stale, I have tried storing it in several ways and it just won’t keep.
Yeah, we get a golden wheat bread, used to be $2.29 full price, frequently on sale for less than $2, now it’s always $3.50+ for one loaf. Costco has two packs for the same price, and our kids go through bread fast enough that we don’t throw much, if any, out.
