sucks to your ass-mar

So I definitely had some sort of asthmatic episode yesterday. Bad scene. My friend K from Pennsic/elsewhere was the only person who responded to my various desperate tweets/texts/emails; I needed someone to more or less talk me through surviving my day, and he came through in spades, as he has been lately. Poor Z was busy at work and sent me one message: "Don't die." and then made me dinner.
The doctor was unhelpful; by the time I got to him my chest was tight but I was a lot better than I had been, and he shrugged; he couldn't really hear anything wrong. But at least we went over my options for medication again; the things I'd been prescribed at my last visit were $300/mo for the maintenance steroid and $70/mo for the rescue inhaler. I'd put a call in to the doc about it but the thing is, you usually wait on hold forever, and I hadn't had time to follow through.
I got home from the appointment and got an immediate call from the pharmacy, saying that the prescriptions were now $300/mo and $58/mo. They were going to call the doctor back, and get back to me today, but for the record, there is no covered version of the rescue inhaler. They're all within a couple bucks of one another. My insurance plan just doesn't cover albuterol rescue inhalers. They're just something I'm expected to buy out of pocket.
What the everloving fuck? I could see if it was something cosmetic, or something like Viagra where it's not crucial to your actual respiratory success or survival, but a fucking RESCUE INHALER? They invented the albuterol rescue inhaler in like 1955. And they're RESCUE INHALERS. They're to RESCUE you. They're IMPORTANT.
Not covered!
I'm so ready to move to a socialist state. Take me away, Norway! I'll give you almost all of my income in return for not worrying where my fucking rescue inhaler is going to come from. I make $200/week after they take out the $40 per paycheck for insurance. Just for the record.
Ugh.
So I'm fighting off the lingering effects of this asthma thing with caffeine instead, which has made me rather... excitable.
And I squee'd myself into a wheezing fit over the news that Buffalo is getting a real ramen bar! OMG so exciting.

So I forget what I've put on LJ and what's elsewhere. I mentioned that K from Pennsic (AKA The Prettiest Princess) and his wife are seriously working on moving to Buffalo to start a restaurant with me, didn't I? We're still doing feasibility stuff but I'm increasingly fixated on the idea as The Only Right Thing In The World.
K has like a bajillion stories, it's kind of what he does. We spend a lot of time talking, lately. So I've been writing down his stories. The added layer, of course, is that I never take notes while he's talking, so there's probably a whole bunch of inaccuracies. Which just makes it even better.
I'll post some once I've collected a few more. :)

it’s getting harder and harder to breathe

So I had an asthma attack yesterday. It sucked. It was the first real asthma attack I’d had since 1984. No obvious triggers, but it sucked. I had been prescribed a maintenance, steroid inhaler to improve my overall lung strength, and a rescue inhaler to take as needed in case of acute episodes, and I’d been given a sample of the maintenance inhaler to see me through.

I found out that neither was covered by my insurance; my insurance only covers generic prescriptions, and if no generic is available, I must pay full price for the name-brand item. I assumed it was just those particular ones, so I intended to call the doctor to get them switched, but of course, I forgot. I improved dramatically on the sample inhaler, but then ran out, and life got hectic. Until yesterday, when it became apparent I really did need to go back on the prescribed medicine.

I went and spoke to the doctor, who wrote as generic a prescription as he could manage. Last night the pharmacy called; it wasn’t covered. They said they’d talk to my doctor today. So tonight I got a call from a nurse at my practice.

There are no steroidal maintenance inhalers available in a generic. The cheapest one they can find me is still nearly $300 a month, and is not covered by my insurance. There are also no rescue inhalers that are generic. The cheapest they can find me is not covered, and will cost me about $60.

I earn about $400 a month, net. (Gross is higher, but of course, taxes, and then my insurance, all have to get taken out. Of course. I pay, for the record, about $20/week for my insurance. It ain’t cheap.)

The doctor’s office scrambled around to find me some samples to get me through so I won’t die imminently, and I’ll call my insurance company to see what the hell their policy would have me do, and I’ll call the drug manufacturer and see if they’ll give me any kind of discount, and I’ll look into buying it cheap from Canada or something.

But I guess I’m just to the point where I’m wondering how this is even legal. How can this company decide what’s too expensive to cover, despite what my doctor thinks? It’s not even like I have a rare condition– I hear about those things and I think, that ain’t right, but then I think, well, you know, it is rare and the treatment’s experimental, maybe the insurance company’s numbers just weren’t factored for something like, well, OK, it’s still bullshit, but it makes sense in a The Cold Equations, sci fi scenario, only one of us can survive kind of way (is that story obscure or did I make that up?). But this?

It’s asthma. Everyone and their mother has asthma. Seriously half the people I know have asthma. And these are not extreme treatments; these are the most basic things they do for people with this incredibly common condition. How can this private company sell me insurance that then doesn’t cover the incredibly common treatment for an incredibly common condition? In what world is that all right to have be legal?

So I’m grumpy tonight, as well as wheezy.