I have to rant – sorry… but this is really bugging me. I was recently diagnosed with diabetes, the “real” kind, not the “change your diet and you’ll be fine” kind. I get a glucose meter from the Dr. and prescriptions for the lancets and the test strips. Head off to the pharmacy. The lancets are covered by my insurance, you know what those are – you stick your finger with a tiny needle so you can get a drop of blood. So I have the meter and I have the lancets. But wait! The test strips (the thingys that the blood goes ON and goes in the meter to let me see what my glucose level is) need a prior approval. Okay, so I can prick my finger and I have the meter but can’t get the blood to the reader. And what do you know…. the insurance company didn’t approve the strips because I “hadn’t tried something else first”. Really???
So my pharmacist, being the great person she is, calls the company and asks what brand IS covered. We get a prescription from the Dr for those. We thought. That brand required prior approval too. Now I don’t know about you, but once I know I have to track something to be healthy, I want to track it! We are a week past getting the original prescriptions from the Dr and I still don’t have test strips. It gets better. Pharmacist gets on the phone again, bless her soul… she figures out what they will cover and the prescription is written in a way that will let her fill it with those test strips. BUT the insurance doesn’t cover the METER now. Because you get those from the Dr usually. I can call and have the manufacturer send me one…. but for $25 I can just buy one.
How dumb is it that I can get the lancet’s to prick my fingers and the meter to read it and I can’t get test strips covered? How many people don’t bother to follow through and get all the supplies they need and are not able to check their glucose levels? I’m not going to die from diabetes any time soon as long as I take care of things, but if other folks don’t be bossy or persistant, they *could* literally die from the consequences.
