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Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The Joy of Insurance Paperwork

Let me start this by saying that I know I am very fortunate to have two insurance providers, the one from my work being my primary insurance and the one from my wife’s work as a secondary provider. The downside of having two insurance companies is that all the paperwork now has to be done twice and getting them to play nice with each other is no easy task.

Late last year I was only on my wife’s insurance, at her renewal time the insurance company informed us of changes to their plan that was going to cost us a lot more money for all of my supplies and prescriptions. At the same time my company’s insurance had their annual open enrolment period. After a lot of research I found that I could join my company’s insurance plan and after paying that premium I would still be money ahead at the end of the year. I know that sounds like a pretty easy deal but that is where this adventure really begins.

The first thing that I had to do was fill out all the obligatory paperwork. I then had to contact my doctor and get all new prescriptions to my new insurance company’s mail order prescription provider. After getting these prescriptions from my doctor and checking them I found that he had a couple of them wrong. Another call to the doctor got that straightened out and I sent them off to my new provider. The next step was to contact my wife’s insurance company and inform them that I now have a new primary insurance provider. I then had to contact my former mail order prescription company and inform them that I have a new primary insurance provider.

Shortly after all the notifying is done I receive a letter from my former mail order prescription company telling me it was time to refill my prescriptions. I call them again and tell them of the change in insurances. Shortly after that they send me a form to fill out to let them know that I now have a different insurance company. The tone of the form led me to think that they thought I was just being a bad person for not filling my medications like they know I should. Oh well, fill out the paperwork and off it goes to them.

About this same time I decided that I would like to get a CGMS to supplement all my other diabetic toys. I e-mailed my diabetes nurse and she sent me some paperwork to fill out and give to my doctor. I filled it out and sent it to them. My doctor does not understand why I want to use a CGMS but I will have to get into that in another post. In the mean time my diabetes nurse gets everything taken care of and I order the CGMS after of course some more paperwork. To get the supplies for my CGMS my diabetes nurse sends all of my prescriptions to yet another mail order supply company. Good news on this company, after some more paperwork they will file both of my insurances for me and I end up with no out of pocket on all of my CGMS supplies except the sensors. I’ll probably write a little more about the sensor situation in the same post that I write about my doctor’s feelings on my having a CGMS.

I received all of my medication prescriptions from my new mail order company and then filled out the paperwork to have my secondary insurance reimburse me for what I paid my primary insurance for the prescriptions. I then received a letter from my secondary insurance stating that my primary insurance did not have the right codes on the receipt for them to reimburse me for what I had paid. I fill out more paperwork requesting the correct billing codes from my primary insurance company. I get their response to my request and fill out more paperwork and send it to my secondary insurance company again. I’m still waiting on their response to this last round of paper work.

All of the above paperwork leads me to my current and most frustrating round of paperwork. I have just received a letter from my current insurance company requesting information on all of my diabetic related treatment and supplies. The part that I have the hardest time understanding is, they are already paying for all of this stuff. I would think that since they are the company paying for these items they would already have all of this information. I would like to have about 10 minuets in their computer system so I could print off all of my information that they have on me so I could then hand it to them so they know everything about my diabetes treatment and supplies. But alas, I fill out more paperwork and off it goes to my insurance company.

Can there be anything better than the pure joy of filling out insurance company paperwork?

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