insurance woes

I haven't yet posted about the latest insurance adventures. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. I've mentioned some of this before but maybe I'll recap.

The kids got new (state-sponsored) health insurance -- Anthem Blue Cross -- as of February 1 and ABC decided to require the doctors to preauthorize all of the expensive meds.

We waited for THREE WEEKS on three meds -- psych meds! -- and he actually ran out of two of them. The insurance company said that he uses too much of these meds in a month. Uhh maybe because that's how many it takes for him to be stable? Who are they to determine that is too much?

The doctor faxed the form three times. Turns out his staff put the wrong member # on it. Apparently it was too much work for ABC to figure out which patient they were supposed to be reviewing the auth for. That finally got straightened out and the insurance company rep said it would take 24 hours for approval. 48 hours later... It still didn't work. Finally, after numerous calls back and forth, our pharmacy tech at the local Walgreens took pity on me and called the insurance on my behalf, and finally got it figured out.

If they hadn't worked it out, Anthem Blue Cross would have been paying for a very expensive psych hospitalization for Ricky. I guess they'd prefer that?

We are probably going to have to go through this with all of his meds. Again. Right after we just finished dealing with HealthNet over the same ones (the state dropped them as a vendor which is why we had to switch to ABC). They were totally useless as well.