How to Get Free Drugs

January 29, 2014
PRESCRIPTION drugs, douchebag.

Prescription drugs, jackball.

 

If you haven’t done your national duty and signed up for government-mandated health care, a) get back in line, prole but 2) read this first. You can game the system for hundreds of dollars.

We’re not going to discuss the inherent instability of ObamaCare, nor how it was designed to fail so it could be the first step to the inevitability of pure socialized medicine. Hell, you people are the ones who voted for it, not us. Nor are we going to explain how cumbersome, inconsistent, sclerotic and self-contradictory the process of submitting to your bettors and purchasing government-approved insurance is. We already did that, and it hasn’t gotten any better. Click on the link, but we’ll repeat the most ominous line from the ObamaCare user agreement here:

This system and equipment are subject to monitoring to ensure proper performance of applicable security features or procedures. Such monitoring may result in the acquisition, recording and analysis of all data being communicated, transmitted, processed or stored in this system by a user. If monitoring reveals possible evidence of criminal activity, such evidence may be provided to Law Enforcement Personnel.

ANYONE USING THIS SYSTEM EXPRESSLY CONSENTS TO SUCH MONITORING.

Caps in the original.

Our state, Nevada, has given most-favored-insurer status to Culinary Workers Union Local 226, the local Marxists and the creators of the state health exchange. Unions still wield considerable power in the Sagebrush State, due to it having high demand for workers who shut up and do what they’re told without any actual skills getting in the way (coffee servers, roulette dealers, etc.)

So, a young and fit Control Your Cash principal with a grand total of zero major and one minor health problems (easily controlled hypertension) avoided the fine and bought hisself a policy. On the surface, the math doesn’t seem to work out:

The policy is $311 a month, with an obscene $6250 annual deductible. A free market being the last thing you’d want in the purchase and sale of health insurance, that was the least bad policy among the 11 offered. Every last one of those policies includes maternity coverage, despite its sole insured being a) male, 2) pedophobic and iii) permanently sterile. Still, you never know when a guy might wake up one morning and find himself with functioning and fertile ovaries.

(Aside: The user-unfriendliness of the state exchange sites is a given, but what we found especially vexing was what the creators assume about the users’ knowledge. Our own state’s site includes the Frequently Asked Question “What is insurance?”, implying that they’re writing this for the lowest common passably literate denominator. Okay, fine. But the very same site then offers “gold”, “silver” and “bronze” plans, introducing new terms without explaining what the differences among them are. Your only hope is to open a few dozen browser windows and compare one plan to another line-by-line. Our state also offers “catastrophic” beside the precious metal descriptors; we incorrectly assumed that such a policy would cover only, you know, catastrophes. Like broken legs and ruptured spleens. But no, it’s as comprehensive as the platinum plans.)

It’d seem to make more sense to suck it up and pay the $95 fine to the IRS, rather than commit to between $3732 and $6250 in medical spending over the next year. (Because it’s the Affordable Care Act, remember?) One problem, however. The drugs.

The hypertension is controlled with a gift from the greatest corporation on Earth, Novartis. They make a pharmaceutical that completely eradicates the insufferable, debilitating headaches that used to show up regularly and portended a stroke. As far as we’re concerned, the $9 billion Novartis made last year wasn’t nearly as much as they deserved. But such a wonder drug ain’t cheap. Ten bucks a day.

You can either whine about governmental incompetence, or you can use it to your advantage. Drug retailer Walgreens issued a press release on December 30 (a/k/a “United States citizens’ penultimate day of health care freedom) that preempted or at least postponed the deluge:

Walgreens to Provide Up to 30-Day Prescription Supply at No Upfront Cost for Public Health Insurance Marketplace Enrollees Who Have Not Been Assigned an Identification Number

The release was written by a public relations hack, which means it’s 20 times longer than it needs to be, so here’s its only relevant sentence:

Through the end of January, patients can bring confirmation of their enrollment in the public health insurance marketplace to a Walgreens pharmacy, or the pharmacy staff can check to verify eligibility, and Walgreens will assist them by providing up to a month of a traditional, brand and generic medication (sic) at no upfront cost.

We tried this, and it freaking worked. Did we mention that the public health insurance marketplace in question might not even demand your first payment for a month or two? Buy a policy now, in any state, and chances are good that it won’t even activate until March 1 or April 1. And again, you don’t have to pay then and there. But getting fronted $311 worth of drugs (or more, your prescriptions may vary) from either an awfully trusting or awfully connected drugstore chain happened just like that.

What’s to stop us from cancelling our policy, especially given that we haven’t even filed any claims yet, and pocketing the hypertension drugs? Unclear. Don’t think we haven’t thought about doing this again by the January 31 deadline. And it’s not as if Walgreens can somehow get its (S)-3-methyl-2-(N-{[2′-(2H-1,2,3,4-tetrazol-5-yl)biphenyl-4-yl]methyl}pentanamido)butanoic acid back once it’s been consumed with coffee and a bagel.

Is this unethical? Sorry, counselor, we reject the premise of the question. The rules have changed. Buying too much house and having it fall into foreclosure is now “being preyed upon by unscrupulous lenders.” Violating immigration law is now “Ningún ser humano es ilegal.” Gaming the healthcare system? Sorry, that’s the American way. As we once heard from a septuagenarian man who crossed into traffic and destroyed our vehicle, trying to appease us before the tow truck arrived and/or he became our garroting victim, “Let’s just let the insurance companies sort it out, huh?”

Filed Under: Healthy Living, Insurance Tagged With: , , ,

Our Attempt At Obamacare

November 20, 2013

Image-heavy post today. If you’re on your phone, you might want to postpone reading until you’re in front of a computer.

Exhibit A, a letter we received early last month. Which brings up an aside: Why are we still getting mail in 2013? Anyone of you want to forgo reading Control Your Cash online every day and instead have us print up the posts and send them to you? Let us know. Anyhow, after 12 years and $50,000 or so worth of business, Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield didn’t even give us a pair of boots and a backpack before telling us we could take a hike:

 Death notice

 

We were incensed at the time, but took some sort of solace in company. After realizing that we were merely among the first of millions, it didn’t feel so bad. Besides, this isn’t ABC/BS’s fault. As the letter indicates, the health plan that had been mutually beneficial to both them and us for a long time (they got money, we got coverage, everyone was happy or at least tolerant of the situation) is now illegal. Or will be at the end of the year. Why? Because it violates at least one provision in this, the laughably titled Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and if you think we’re going to scour all 389,365 words of it (actual count, not hyperbole) to determine exactly which subsection(s) our old plan ran afoul of, we’re not.

But the good news is, as evidenced in the lower corner of the photo, that all is not lost. In fact, we might find an even better deal at our state’s new health insurance exchange! The exchanges, one to a state, are supposed to operate as an Orbitz or Expedia of sorts, only for health insurance instead of hotels and flights. Although there’s one crucial juncture where the analogy self-destructs: Orbitz never goes down, at least not in the dozens of times we’ve ever used it. Then again, technically our state health insurance exchange has only gone down once.

The exchange has been open for 7 weeks now, sufficiently long to have ironed out any kinks, right? That’s enough time to have built a dozen floors of the Empire State Building, or 384 miles of the Alaska Highway, so rewriting a few lines of code in an air-conditioned office with a break room and probably a foosball table shouldn’t be too hard, should it? Let’s ask the members of this happy and ethnically-ambiguous-but-certainly-not-Caucasian family that adorns our state exchange’s landing page:

 

Obamacare landing page

 

The “Apply Now” button redirects to…the page shown above, in a recursive display of a recursive display. So instead we clicked the hyperlinked text that reads “sign up for an account”. It goes without saying that we weren’t looking to purchase anything in earnest, so we used a bogus name and bogus other data. Thank you, Howard Stern, for giving us a readily available pseudonym for just such situations:

 

dell' Abate application

 

Why the username has to contain at least one numeral (they said “number”, but including the string “five” in our 1st attempt at a username didn’t take), we couldn’t tell you. Again, that requirement is merely for one’s username, not the password. If you live in Nevada and have a juvenile bent, like us, you’ll be happy to know that the site will accept a username that includes a 4-letter obscenity. Provided, of course, that you include at least 4 other characters, no fewer than one of which must be a numeral.

Given that we were on a site sponsored or at least mandated by a federal government that won’t stop spying on its citizens until it achieves omniscience, we figured it’d behoove us to actually read the Terms of Use this time instead of just blindly signing off on them. The worst Apple can do to us is apply Digital Rights Management to our song purchases. Nevada Health Link wields a little more power over its customers than does the largest company on Earth, for those of you who are still convinced that corporations pose the biggest threat to modern society:

 

Burn notice

 

You call it “chilling”, we call it faceless cyber-surveillance that the attorneys didn’t even bother to attribute to a particular entity. Just know that you’re being watched, and that’s that. Hey, at least they went to the trouble of disclosing it, instead of just monitoring us without our express consent. We clicked the boxes – excuse us, Baba Booey clicked the boxes – and we continued to the next exciting page in this charade that serves only to add complexity to what used to be the relatively uncomplicated task of buying health insurance.

 

Endless loop

 

A couple of points about “You’re about to begin the employee healthcare enrollment process for .”

  • Go back to the 2nd image, the one with the happy family dancing in translucent glee. There are two fairly conspicuous buttons at the bottom of that page. We clicked the “Individuals and Families” one, so we’re not sure why being an employee of anyone or anything would factor into this. Besides, the folks at the exchange should know that we’d take it as a gross insult if they’d insinuate that we’d work for someone else.
  • How the hell is that sentence supposed to end? We’re about to begin the employee healthcare enrollment process for what?

Information from our employer? Seriously, what are they talking about? We were fluxxomed (it’s like flummoxed, only worse) but we’d still crossed every x and dotted every j up until this point, so we continued by pressing the “Next” button. And got this page:

 

Endless loop

 

Wait, did it not take? Let’s press the “Next” button again, make sure that the page refreshes:

 

Endless loop

 

Well, this is getting awkward. Okay, one more time:

 

Endless loop

 

And that’s where they left us. 513 other people found a back door that we don’t know about, so right now we’re among the 99.9998% of Nevadans on the outside looking into this life-saving, labor-saving construct that will protect us as patients and make our care easier to afford. Thank you, elected overlords. Thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Which are fortunately beating at a normal rate, otherwise we might need health care coverage. The good news is that we’ve still got 6 weeks to comply with the law. Just 330 more miles of frozen tundra to slog through.

Filed Under: Insurance Tagged With: ,

The Name “Affordable Care Act” is 33% Accurate

October 2, 2013
Adding a little kid to a bill signing makes it 236% more adorable and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT HIDEOUS ABOMINATION BETWEEN HARRY REID AND MAX BAUCUS KILL IT KILL IT WITH FIRE

Adding a little kid to a bill signing makes it 236% more adorable and WHAT IS THAT GROTESQUE ABOMINATION BETWEEN HARRY REID AND MAX BAUCUS KILL IT KILL IT WITH FIRE

It’s definitely an act, as opposed to a legitimate attempt to reduce bureaucracy and thereby reduce costs in what used to be a faintly uncomplicated sector of the economy. In fact, the bureaucracy the Act creates is staggering in its depth. It not only makes private health a public concern, but places the mandatory purchase of insurance under the purview of the Internal Revenue Service. Buy coverage or pay a fine. In other words, You’re going to be covered, and you’re going to like it. Do we make ourselves clear? 

How do an ostensibly free people get collectively subjected to such a mandate? Not without substantial effort on the part of a political class committed to see its social agenda enacted. In several steps:

1. Come up with a baseless allegation, quantify it, but do so in such a way that it can’t be disproven, e.g. “47 million Americans don’t have health insurance!”

Many Americans go their entire 20s without health insurance, because it makes economic sense for them. For the tiny likelihood of a young man or woman falling off a cliff and needing $500,000 in treatment, it can be a perfectly rational decision to forgo spending the few thousand dollars in premia.

Furthermore, the few policies available in the oligopolistic market offer little in the way of choice. It’s inefficient for insurers to offer perfectly individualized policies, which leads to semi-generic policies that include maternity coverage for single men with vasectomies. To say nothing of contraception for groups of exceedingly post-menopausal celibate women.

Pay for something and get add-ons that you not only didn’t want but have no possible use for? No thanks. After all, this is a society of people who have petitioned Congress to introduce bills that prevent cable companies from selling packages with superfluous channels. Yet there’s little momentum to prevent something similar in the insurance market. Americans would rather pay for unnecessary drug rehabilitation coverage than pay for unwanted Azteca America and RFD TV. 

2. Sell the allegation as a flaw in the status quo, a wrong to be righted, rather than the cumulation of personal choice.

It’s not as if most of those “47 million” have ever been prohibited from buying health insurance. They just choose not to.

Again, personal choice, if that isn’t an outmoded concept. Forcing health care coverage on everyone, and artificially flattening the prices, gives incentive to otherwise irrational behavior. As the Roanoke Times recently put it,

[Y]oung and healthy people must pay into a system that would otherwise be overburdened with the costs of treating the older, sicker population

Avoid the short-term decisions that will result in diabetes, heart disease, cirrhosis or something else life-threatening down the road? Why bother? An uninsured rational agent today has tremendous implicit encouragement to not be rash. The forcibly insured rational agent of 2015 does not.

3. Take the allegation to its logical extreme and appeal to emotion. “97-year-old Ida Cruikshank of Ames, Iowa has spina bifida and stage 4 lymphoma. You want to throw her out on the street?” If it means impoverishing the rest of us, sure, why not?

4. Stand economics on its head, and this is the complicated step.

Obviously, a little kid with hydrocephaly is going to cost tons to insure. There’s no way an insurer can make money off a policy underwritten for such a patient, so it makes no sense to offer said policy.

Begin with that moral imperative, that overarching objective – Health care coverage for all, at all costs (the dependent phrase there spoken softly) – and find a workaround. Here’s a conversation that doubtless happened between the ruling class and the heads of various insurers. We don’t have the transcript handy, so our reenactment will have to do:

Anthem CEO: We can’t write policies that we know will lose money.
White House: Yes, but you’re not going to lose money. Listen to this.
Okay, you’re going to lose money on a few policies–those of the uninsurable we mentioned above–by charging below-market rates. HOWEVER, what if we more than made up for it by forcing tens of millions more people, perfectly healthy people, to buy your product? Then…
Anthem CEO: [eyes light up]
White House: You can charge whatever you want, pretty much. Triple market rates, quadruple market rates, knock yourself out. You will have the power of federal law behind you. And don’t think we won’t enforce it.
Anthem CEO: This looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Don’t believe the journalists. Here’s the money quote from the Department of Health & Human Services’ own website:

[I]nsurers can no longer deny coverage to children because of a pre-existing condition, like asthma or diabetes, under the health care law. And beginning in 2014, health insurers will no longer be able to charge more or deny coverage to anyone because of a pre-existing condition.

Name another commodity for which this makes a lick of sense. The people who are going to consume the most resources will pay as much as those who will use the least (the department said in unambiguous language.) If there’s a fundamental difference between this and, say, a mobile phone service provider charging its international roaming customers no more than it charges the customers who never make non-emergency calls, we’re too stupid to find it.

Filed Under: Economics, Insurance, Taxes Tagged With: , , ,