Test Strip Love

We have been waiting what seems like FOREVER to see if the Freestyle test strips would be authorized as medical necessity since they are the strips Ike’s OmniPod uses and they aren’t normally covered by our insurance.

Well I received a call on Friday from Ike’s doctors office letting us know that the request for medical necessity was approved! Unfortunately when our pharmacy tried to run the script it kept getting rejected! Well I called Caremark today and talked to a girl who was amazing! She is the first person to tell me that while they provide the prescription benefits – another company, Allied Benefit, administers the plan and does all the authorizations! Finally I felt like I was getting somewhere!

I called Allied and talked to a extremely helpful rep who assured me that the authorization was approved, he checked with the prescription benefits coordinator who gave me a date to have my pharmacy run as the service start date. Thankfully, he also gave me a number, extension, name, and case number to have the pharmacy call in case it still didn’t work. It didn’t work – but my pharmacy was gladly willing to call!

I just heard back and it turns out they had associated the authorization with another family member and for that reason it wasn’t going through!

Ultimate goal achieved – a months worth of Freestyle test strips are now waiting to be picked up at the pharmacy! Ike is going to be one happy camper and personally – I never knew how much I love test strips!

Freestyle and CVS/Caremark

So earlier this year – long before Ike had decided to do the insulin pump – our insurance decided that they were no longer going to cover the FreeStyle test strips. UGH! That is what we had been using and Ike really like them and so did I because it took so little blood to get a reading. Needless to say we changed to a meter our insurance would cover the strips for. Fast forward to now and guess what test strips the Omnipod PDM (Personal Diabetes Manager) uses … you guessed it – FreeStyle! I just shelled out $70 for 100 test strips and that is WITH the MyFreeStyle coupon. Thank you Abbott for saving me some money! My doctor’s office is working on submitting a medical exception request to CVS/Caremark to see if we can get the strips covered under insurance. Ike has just downsized to a smaller bag because he doesn’t have to carry insulin and a tester now (more about his bag in a future post) and I don’t want him to have to drag around another tester just because the strips aren’t covered by insurance. Insurance can be sooooo frustrating!

Update: see post on Test Strip Love