The Folly of the Insurance Companies

Yesterday was a blah kind of day, for no particular reason. Little storms kept bursting through the area, leaving my sinuses aching. I finally got Mr. Smarty Pants to the doctor to see what is going on with his tummy aches and other complaints. Turns out he's not just being psychosomatic. He's got acid reflux. Poor little guy.

Spent half the morning arguing with the prescription insurance company to cover the right medicine for him. The doctor prescribed a version of Prevacid that dissolves in water, and he can just drink it. Sounds perfect for a 7 year old, right? The insurance company doesn't think so.

This seriously aggravates me. They want him to swallow a pill. An over-the-counter pill, at that.

That just isn't going to work for me, for a myriad of reasons.

1. I trust my son's pediatrician. If he wanted him to take the same stuff my husband takes, he would have said so.

2. 7 years old is a little young to have to learn how to swallow a pill, particularly when you have an inflamed throat.

3. If the rep for the insurance company who told me this has an M.D., I will eat my flip-flop.

4. In the year or so we've had this company for drug coverage, Mr. Smarty Pants has had 1 prescription filled. This prescription was for a generic antibiotic (the pink stuff you put in the fridge). The cost for this without insurance (because we've been there, done that), is $7.99. My co-pay was $5. They've spent $2.99 on medicine for him so far. Big spender, right? We've paid in much, much more than that. Cheap b&*@#ds.

I ran into the same problem with our health insurance when Mr. Smarty Pants had his vision problem last year. His left eye was nearly blind (20/200), while his right eye was much better than that. The insurance company wanted to just give him glasses, which still didn't correct the sight entirely, and call it good. A good friend of my mother's is an opthalmologist, and she told me to take him to a specialist, that there might be a way to correct it because he was still so young.

The insurance company wouldn't pay for Mr. Smarty Pants to see a Pediatric Neuro-Opthalmologist, no matter how I argued. If I wanted to do it, it was out of pocket, no reimbursement. I was fortunate enough to have some money squirreled away to do it. His left eye is improving. He wears an eye patch every day, and will do so for the next few years, and I spend $250 every 4-6 months to get him checked out and get new treatments and therapies. Why? Because it can be (mostly) fixed, and I hope that someday he'll have binocular vision.

And we have a much better insurance company through my beloved's job than I did through my old job.

The whole thing just annoys the crap out of me, and takes up a lot of time I could be spending doing much more pleasant things.

I did manage to transplant the bush beans and summer squash temporarily into larger containers. I'm trying the self-watering water bottles with those. They are on the front porch table hardening off, and the carrots have been moved to the porch floor. They are mostly thriving, only 2 haven't made it. The lazy woman's guide to thinning seedlings. With the water bottle self-watering containers so far, it just seems like the overflow container on the bottom is staying full. I may be doing it wrong though. My sweetie is more engineeringly-inclined than I am.

The diet coke bottle topsy turvy watering containers are also not staying full. Either the plants were desperate, or the soil just can't wick it and it's dripping through the bottom.

This morning I will harvest some lettuce. One plant has started going to seed, but the baby ones are coming up nicely. I wish July would end already. It's brutally hot out and it's not even 9 a.m.

It's my sweetie's one Saturday a month to work half a day. When he's done, a-mulching we will go, and hopefully I will get the beans and summer squash into the ground tomorrow. The carrots I may wait another couple days for until the tops look a little more vigorous.

Happy Saturday!