New complaint of the day (and one that could also be its own thread, so my apologies)- insurance companies.
My mom's been in declining health the last couple years- arthritis, spinal stenosis, her legs have been giving out, she fell down the stairs and cracked her head open a few years ago which has affected memory and motor function, they found some melanoma last week- you name it, it's happened to her, poor thing. She was getting pretty good healthcare through the state, along with some extra financial help since she's on Disability, but in January they sent her a letter saying they'd no longer cover her medications anymore, and didn't specify why. So she went without all her pain meds for a few months while she found a new provider. Things had been going relatively smoothly until recently, when the new provider sent a notice saying they weren't covering one of her injections for arthritis/bone density because apparently her doctor hadn't sent in the prescription (they had). She's been taking it for years, she needs it to even remotely function (she says it basically helps take her pain levels from like a 95% to a 90%, so not much, but it does help).
The other day, she called up Medicare and explained her financial situation and how the doctor
had sent the prescription, and the lady she talked to proceeded to dig into her, denying everything she said and saying that if she had such trouble with her finances and her memory, then she needed to look into a senior care center. My mom called me in tears afterward, saying she hadn't felt so demoralized and embarrassed in decades. She's been quite self-conscious about her memory issues since she had her accident, and, like everyone, is quite scared of getting old, so for this lady to call out both of those things really hit home. Especially from a place that's literally designed to help people in need. She told her doctor all this, and of course they were on her side, and reached out to Medicare themselves to chew them a new one, but my mom got a response back saying that they couldn't figure out which agent she talked to on her phonecall, but they were "sorry for not meeting her expectations". Give me a break.
I was fuming by the end of her telling me all this too, and I was a split second away from calling myself and getting to the bottom of it, and I would not have been as kind as her doctor was.
Mind you, this is after literal years of trying to get her meds and doctor's visits covered in the first place, since nobody believed she was having these issues until she was basically immobile from them. It had been well over a decade of fighting to get people to believe her and take her seriously, and even then, to get the medication she needed was a whole other saga. My mom's got a bunch of piercings and tattoos- she's in her early 60's, but still dresses kinda punk; point is, she gets singled out way more than she should just because of how she looks. I've lost track of the amount of times she's been pulled aside for "random screening" at the airport, or denied pain meds by a doctor because they think she just wants them to get high.
And it just maddens me to no end that her story is just one of countless, countless stories each day. Hell, I've had to jump through more hoops than I can count for my ADHD meds, and now that I finally got one that works and they agree to cover it, it's completely out of stock everywhere, but I digress. Insurance companies don't care about their clients, flat out, and no one is ever held responsible for saying or doing any of these things.
