I finally got that mess straightened out with the mail order prescription service. (Which mess is he talking about? Why, this one, of course!) I received my medication in the proper amounts and I received a lot of apologies from various folks at the company. What I couldn't quite get out of them was a convincing "This will never happen again."
What essentially happened was this: To get the pills from them under my insurance, I needed to have my doctor not only make out a prescription for them but two of what they call "prior authorizations" — one that said I needed the drug and one that said I needed it in the specific dosage and therefore quantity.
I do not understand why the additional two forms were necessary since they just repeated what he said on the first one but pharmacies, like the Lord, works in strange and mysterious ways. Hey, Someone! Want a way to lower the cost of medical care in this country? There's got to be at least fifty dollars in savings by fixing that!
Anyway, my doctor — good sport that he is — gave them the necessary prior authorizations. In fact, he gave them the dosage one three times but somehow, each one only got into parts of the pharmacy company's computer. They were all in there but some departments that looked me up saw that I had one prior authorization and not the other. That's when they told me I was wrong and one even accused me of lying.
So what I had to do in my many, many phone calls was argue and demand to be switched to supervisors or supervisors of supervisors until I found someone whose computer showed that I had all of them. That person would assure me that the pills would be sent out, toot sweet…
…and then the computer in the shipping division which actually sent out the stuff would say to itself, "Nope, this customer doesn't have the proper prior authorizations" and it would cancel the shipment.
And that was all that computer did. It didn't tell anyone. It didn't send me an e-mail or one of those old-fashioned letters on paper (do they even still make those?) that said, "Your shipment is not coming." It didn't even tell the person in the company who had authorized the shipment that it wasn't sending it out. It just didn't send it, end of story.
Eventually, I'd figure out my pills weren't coming and I'd call up and start the process anew. On my seventh (I think) attempt, I reached someone who figured out the whole problem but apparently not how to solve it. He said, with the confidence of someone who'd never seen the movie 2001, that he could override the computer in the Shipping Department and force them to (a) send it out and (b) notify him if there was any problem. It did neither. Once again, it just canceled the order and kept that information to itself.
I believe it was Try #8 when I found a nice lady who knew how to beat her company's own system…and it wouldn't surprise me if what she did was to leave her desk, march down to the Shipping Department, stuff an envelope and send me the pills herself. And if that didn't work, she was prepared to meet me in a schoolyard somewhere and sell me the damned drugs.
By my reckoning, it took 40 days for them to get me a 60 day supply. I'm going to start renewing now and let's see if I get this one before I have to pack for Comic-Con…