addendum to medical travails
A last little bit of maddening wrongness about my medical situation is the pharmacy pricing at McKinley (our student health center.) If I'm on one dosage that's available as one pill (e.g. 200 mcg or 175 mcg), I pay $5/month. This is not actually a charge for the drugs, but rather a copay they instituted on all prescriptions to subsidize the cost of birth control when Bush cut birth control funding.
That's fine. The problem is when I have to be on more than one dose, e.g. 200/175 on alternating days.
If the prescription says nothing or "take as directed," I am charged $5. If it says "take every other day" or "alternate with 200," I am charged $10. For the exact same thing. Because it's a "two month supply." Except that it's not a two-month supply; it's a one-month supply and I alternate it with another one-month supply that I buy from the same pharmacy for the same $5.
Those fucking fuckers that came up with charging double for a two-month supply. Do you pay more for a box of cereal if you eat it more slowly? I have a container of dried beans in my cupboard. They've been there for months, and I've never cooked or eaten a single one. By the McKinley pricing scheme, they should be worth 10x as much. Also, what if the doctor prescribes me one single pill to be taken once? Should I pay 365x as much because it's a year's supply?
I don't think I've ever paid double for the "two-month supply." I just refuse to pick up the prescription until the asshole pharmacist is off, or get it rewritten as "take as directed." But this last time, I went up to the administration to settle it once and for all. Only problem is that the pharmacy administrator is on break for a week, so I am actually *taking the wrong dose* in protest of their ridiculous policy. I don't care if that's how the "real world" charges for medications. It's morally wrong and I won't stand for it.
posted by karenlikescereal @ 4:54 p. m.
3 Comments:
Well, actually prescription copays help keep insurance costs down, since pharmaceutical companies charge more for innovative new medicines. Without copays, we'd all get the most expensive medicines (even when generics work just as well), and without copays we're all more likely to take pills we don't need. So a $5 fee in this case saves you more per year than no copay at all (you'd just pay way more in insurance premiums).
But the 2-month supply argument is garbage, particularly when you're not actually getting a 2-month supply. Your doctor should really step up to the plate here and get it repackaged right.
I'm not against copays in principle (it does encourage people to use less resources, the same way paying your heating bill does.) I'm not sure that my insurance premiums are or should be linked to the difference between a $5 copay and no copay at all, though. And like you say, I'm really against the arbitrary bullshit.
Oh, also, insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies should just charge less in general. Sure, they have to make up development costs, but Synthroid's been around since 1955. I think it's just profit at this point.
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