Channeling Kafka

So this is fabulous Week 3, and I am, in fact, feeling pretty great. But I'm also well aware that Week 1 is just a few days away, which means that the fog will be rolling in again pretty soon. (There's got to be a Brigadoon reference here somewhere. Help me out, fellow theater fans—leave a clever comment or something, won't you?)

Hence my effort to do all of those tasks that require lucidity now, while the fog is still on the horizon rather than in and around my head. Which means that I spent the whole of yesterday going through the latest stack of medical bills and insurance statements and calling various medical billing departments in order to straighten out the latest set of snafus.

My current favorite is the statement I got from Zach's insurance company (which is my secondary insurance) showing that they rejected a claim from the outpatient surgery center where I had my first surgery back in mid-December. I'm not sure why the center billed them in the first place, because our coverage didn't start until January 1 (and that's why, in fact, they rejected the claim). But I was especially surprised to see that Zach was listed as the patient.

Actually, that was my current favorite, until today. (Things move fast around here.)

Today I went to my local pharmacy to pick up a prescription for Emend, which is one of the new anti-nausea wonder drugs. You take one pill an hour before treatment, another the next day, and another the day after that. My doctor warned me that it was kind of expensive before he prescribed it back in early February, so I wasn't surprised when the co-pay was $30. (With our insurance, Rx co-pays are usually $10.)

Now, $10 per pill is pretty steep, but the stuff seems to work (although it's hard to assess cause and effect because I'm taking a couple of other anti-nausea drugs, too), and I've been happy to ante up. I paid the $30 before the first treatment, and I paid another $30 to refill the prescription before the second treatment. So when I walked into the pharmacy today, to pick up another refill in time for Friday's treatment, I was fully expecting to fork over another $30.

Not so fast.

The very nice lady behind the counter fished out my prescription, looked at it, then looked at me with a straight face and told me the price: two hundred eighty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents. (I had to write it out because it's so absurd.)

My eyebrows went north. My jaw went south. My brain momentarily short-circuited.

I tried to reason with the very nice lady behind the counter. I explained that this was a second refill, and that it wasn't possible for the price to increase more than 800% from refill #1 to refill #2. And that nearly $100 per pill was completely outrageous.

The very nice lady did the only thing she could—she handed me off to the very nice pharmacist. He explained that this was the price quoted by my insurance company, and that I'd have to call them—not to straighten it out, mind you, but to get an explanation for the increase. He told me that he spends all day on the phone with insurance companies, dealing with situations like this, and that there was probably some cockamamie reason for change in price. He also told me that if I had no insurance at all, the three pills would cost $357.99. (I'm sure that folks who are uninsured are just lining up to pay almost $120 per pill to keep from puking their guts up.)

I'll be calling my insurance company first thing tomorrow.

This ought to be good.