I Prefer My Doughnuts with Sprinkles

Customers are always asking us why their copay is what it is. Some people are downright snotty about it and those are the ones I like to give the 'right-back-atcha' answer -- "well gosh, it's YOUR insurance plan that sets the copay" -- which, also happens to be the only correct answer. But when someone claims their copays are hugely different from last time, I'll try to go to the trouble of looking up what they paid last time, because we all know that someone who claims their copays are totally different probably paid exactly the same amount last month, and I figure if I'm lucky I can confirm that, shut them up and move on to the next person.

I was a little slow this week in realizing that a couple of our customers whose copays went through the roof have hit the doughnut hole (or "coverage gap" in the proper terminology of Medicare Part D). One guy even TOLD me he was in the doughnut hole, but only after I had spent precious time looking up his old prices and making sure we hadn't submitted the claims wrong. So he KNEW he was there but didn't seem to know what that meant ----totally wide-eyed and flabbergasted at his new prices (total: hundreds of dollars, which I know he does not have). The guy just stood there for several minutes and literally didn't know what to do. We have another customer who I noticed has a small bag of meds to pick up and a price tag of over $1000 smacked on the front. I really hope I don't have to ring that one up.

Well, now I will clue in a little faster when this comes up again. It's wicked, though. One more example of how your pharmacist gets to deliver the bad news.