Post 92: How much? What?!?

Today was supposed to be low key. I was waiting for the pharmacy to call with tracking information, and that was the only important thing on my to-do list. They called around noon, and said that they’d received an additional prescription, and would be adding it to the order that would ship later today. I agreed, and asked them to call me back if there were any problems.

About an hour later, they called. Man, did we have problems! Our insurance has changed since we did IVF in 2014/2015. At the time, Freedom Fertility was the best, and lowest cost pharmacy, and our out of pocket expense was around $350-$450 depending on which medications had been prescribed. We now have insurance through CVS Caremark, and when I spoke with the pharmacy, I was told that they recommended I find a different pharmacy to handle our prescriptions. The estimated total before insurence was $5,079! What?!? And after insurance, our out of pocket expense was just shy of $2,500! Ahhhhhh!! They were so concerned that they called me to tell me the steps to finding a lower cost option. 

Within a few minutes, I was on the phone with my insurence. Aparently, they are their own preferred provider, and anywhere else is out of network and ungodly expensive. CVS Caremark has another side known as Caremark Specialty, which is who I’m now working with. It took about fifteen phone calls back and forth between Caremark, Freedom, and Wake Forest, but my prescriptions were officially transferred to the correct pharmacy, and they might even get here in time. Ugh. This was a stressor that was not needed today. I’m supposed to call Caremark tomorrow to get the final price. They said it should definitely be less than the quote from Freedom, but didn’t say by how much. Fingers crossed that it’ll be a reasonable amount. Yes, we can cover $2,500 if we need to; no, I’m not going to do it happily.