Best Buy Electronics, Blockbuster Video, and the health insurance industry. Three entities, one big thing in common: If they can find a way to screw you, they will.

Today the discussion is insurance. It’s been a couple months now since Clancy’s contract with the University of Estacado came to a close and she found herself without health insurance. We decided to put her on my plan. The only problem with that was that we had to demonstrate proof of an extenuating circumstance within 30 days of her loss of coverage. Since she got started late, all of the documentation we had was already past 30 days the day she left. That meant contacting her old insurance company and having them send something to my insurance company. The old insurance company has no motivation to do so since they aren’t going to make any money… so again and again after they promised they would they never did. Fortunately, my insurance company didn’t ask for it and she was covered.

Or at least we thought that she was. The thing is that we haven’t gotten a confirmation letter or an insurance card. All we’ve got is my paycheck being deducted $118 per paycheck rather than the $18 it was a few months ago. The paycheck swipes would suggest that she was covered, but you can never be really sure about that. All it would take is for one beancounter to note some missing documentation and suddenly they don’t have to pay us squat.

This week was open enrollment and I was debating whether or not we should just re-enroll her clean. The HR lady said that was entirely unnecessary because she was covered… but that reminded me of the aforementioned quality of insurance companies… if they can screw you, they will.

Turned out to be a non-issue. At the absolute last second they changed carriers, so everyone has to re-enroll. Tonight is the last night I have to bring everything home and have us fill it out, so I’m partially writing this post as a reminder to myself to remember to take the documentation home.

We had the meeting Monday afternoon. The new insurance company penalizes the living crap out of anyone that uses a name-brand drug when there is a generic available. So I asked a simple question… “What happens if the prescription specifically lists a brand-name drug, can the pharmacist switch it out for a generic?”

“Can you give me an example?”

The reason I asked was that I will probably start taking Welbutrin again at some point soon for smoking cessation. Welbutrin is going to go generic on 1/1/8, so I wanted to make sure that if I got a prescription before the new year that I wouldn’t pay a hefty price because it says “Welbutrin” rather than “Bupropion”. The thing is that I didn’t want to tell everyone which drug I was taking… so I said that Zoloft recently became a generic.

So now pretty much everyone is assuming that I take Zoloft for depression. I had a coworker come up to me and ask how long I had been taking it. I explained the whole Welbutrin thing and she asked how well Welbutrin does for smoking cessation… as we were talking about that a company bigwig walked up and asked if he was interrupting anything because he had a (work) question for me. Anyhow, we hedged what we were talking about (the guy doesn’t approve of smoking at all) and he said to me, “Oh, talking about your Zoloft prescription?”