I felt bad accepting financial aid for my medication, but also, I DID NEED THE FINANCIAL AID. so maybe that’s alright.
and now I can finally get my immunosuppressants and pay zero dollars for them, so that’s good!
this is very good advice, boosting this so more people can see
I'm also mad at myself for not accepting assistance on another medication. to be fair, I was in a better financial spot when I started it, but also I think my too-literal brain interpreted the question as "would your card bounce if you tried to pay for this?" and not "would you benefit from aid?"
the literalism was also a problem when I was applying for aid for the Cosentyx, because the person organizing my case had to first check off that everything else had been tried before resorting to a biologic immunosuppressant. and one of their questions was "have you tried taking over-the-counter anti-inflammatories (like Advil) to solve the problem?" and I answered no, because I was in pain every minute of every day, and if I was just popping Advils like Tic Tacs my liver would turn to sludge.
but what they were actually asking was "has Advil not been a solution for you", in which case I could've answered 'yes'. anyway, because of this fuck-up on my part, my claim got denied twice in a row, and the third time it was only accepted because the person assisting me said very wearily "maybe Advil gives you stomach aches, and that's why you can't take it" and I finally cottoned on and was like "yeaaaaah......yeah, that's it."
I used to think I didn't have autistic literalism because I understand metaphors, but it is actually a deficit that impacts my life lol
I’m allistic AF but recently had to go through A Process to get a fancy eczema medication, and the process involved a mail-order pharmacy employee on the phone reading out boilerplate to me at lightning “I’ve read this 10k times” speeds, while I sat up sleepily in bed (because they only call in the morning.)
A. I got to the point in the process where she said “okay, this will cost $2037.93” or whatever (definitely more than $2k USD) and then there was this silence. I squeaked, “I have a copay card? From the manufacturer?” and she instantly went into a different boilerplate shpiel, just as practiced, about how they process the $0 copay card. Including making me affirm that they, the pharmacy, hadn’t told me about the co-pay program. They aren’t allowed to tell you about the only thing that makes this prescription feasible even for me, a middle-class person with ‘good’ insurance.
B. In the middle of one of her paragraphs, there was a sentence with a logical impossibility in it. I understood what they were driving at, but I repeated it to her and asked about the contradiction. Shhe looked in her script and said “huh. Yeah, that’s what it says…you’re right. That DOES make no sense. I’ve read this…SO many times, and no one ever noticed that before.”
Neither part of this — the $2000 barrier that only evaporates if your doctor told you about the copay card or you searched for it (I think mine told me, but months before I decided to go for this treatment, so I had forgotten and found it on the website); nor the procedure which apparently relies on the customer/patient just agreeing to anything to get through the bother — seems friendly to autists (or anyone else.)
Bureaucracy is often an uncut curb.
