Wednesday, January 10, 2018

A Cruel Tease

My husband is type 2 diabetic. After seeing three different doctors, one gave him a sample of Tresiba to mix/ add in with the other drugs.
This worked. My husband's blood sugar numbers were in the 80s. (Adult normal sugars are 70–99 mg/dl.) It was like he wasn't even diabetic! (Other than, you know, taking a bunch of pills and stabbing himself with several needles a day.)
Fantastic! Things were working as they were supposed to work. Then the sample ran out. I went to CVS for the refill.
That was the first week of December, over a month ago.
It wasn't filled. They weren't sure why. Phone calls were made. Computers were stared at. More calls, faxes, etc. I went back, week after week, to check (IN PERSON) if there was any change. Nope.
Today CVS claimed that the hold up is the insurance company. Aetna, they said, won't allow the prescription to be filled because a generic of the drug does not exist yet, and they just don't want to pay for a brand.
Mind you, I also have to get one of John's diabetic pills from the manufacturer because the "three pills that sort of make up a generic, kind of" (and cost more, combined, than just buying the one) include something that irritates my husband's stomach lining to the point of him becoming a non-functioning adult. (If you crap your time away because you spend more than 15 mins every hour, meaning you also don't sleep, going to the toilet, then yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and call that non-functioning. He couldn't keep the crap in long enough to get from the toilet at home to the toilet at work, and at work he couldn't do his job because he couldn't be too far from a toilet... and he couldn't spend two hours in there per shift... so, yeah, non-functioning.)

My husband has a full time job. He has health insurance through his job. And yet, here we are, with this as our reality.
The system is broken. The insurance company would sooner pay massive hospital bills --if my husband were to go into a diabetic coma-- than just be sure he gets the medicine his DOCTORS agree, and have PROVEN, works.
It's messed up. I just needed to vent. It feels cruel to me to tell a patient, "Well, we've got something that will help. Here, try it! See? It helps. Okay, glad you enjoyed that... sorry, you can't have it."

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