Monday, March 24, 2014

LA Medicaid / LaCHIP Aggravations

I am ready to kill someone. I have been fighting with this Medicaid determination nonsense and jumping through their hoops and sending them everything they have asked for, for months. I applied back in November.  I had to call repeatedly and ask them for updates on the status because they never sent me additional information in the mail or called me. They kept telling me "It was under process and review in Baton Rouge". This run around happened for almost 2 months, with me leaving messages and not having my calls returned. Then I *finally* managed to catch the woman supposedly helping handle my case on the phone, and she tells me the same thing again.. and at that point I blew up, telling her the "coverage" they stuck me with "in the meantime" does NOT have prescription coverage for medications I need to function like a normal person. And there was a pause on her side, and then she says "Well we're still waiting to receive your medical records from Mayo Clinic. We sent 3 requests."

Excuse me?!  So you have been waiting for records over a month, never got anything from them, and *never* bother to contact me about it?  I was livid, and I expressed such.

Thus I had to go and call Mayo myself, and get bounced around between their departments, but not a single one that was relevant for medical records requests typical of the kind Medicaid offices send, had any requests of that nature on file.

In other words, they had never been contacted by Louisiana Medicaid asking for my records. So either they never did it, or they sent the request to the wrong place somehow, repeatedly.

So I kindly requested the correct info direct from Mayo, and then called the woman back and gave it to her so she could request it again.  So once again I give it a week, because it was the weekend by then. Nothing heard back, I call and leave a message, no response. I wait, and I call and leave another message clearly asking if they had gotten my medical records from Mayo, and requesting a callback and offering my number.

I finally got an issue with my Mayo online patient portal cleared up, and I can access certain condensed versions of my medical files. So I call the woman back again, and get her voicemail again. I leave another message asking again to be contacted so I know they got my Mayo files, and I asked if they had not, could I try and get some of the relevant files from my patient portal and send those instead as proof of my medical conditions.

They still haven't called me back as of Friday. Then Saturday I get another letter in the mail dated for the 19th stating they needed me to resend my bank statement info because what I sent before wasn't adequate enough ( it's an online only e-check account, so yeah ).  No mention of *anything* else, not telling me they got my message or medical info, just requesting I resend the bank statements.

Now today I get something dated the 20th, literally the day after they mailed the other thing, telling me they have determination I am not eligible. *Before* I have even sent them the remaining info they requested.

My blood is boiling over the aggravation and stress this has put me through, on top of the burden of trying to come up with $500 per month *before* the Cymbalta generic came out, and now still having to pay $300 a month for the generic of Cymbalta. I had to cut my dose in half so I could safely taper off of it, because my family can't keep struggling to scrape out that much money that none of them have for something that used to be almost fully covered by my damned Minnesota state aid healthcare.

It is clearly obvious these people are either complete idiots and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, they are intentionally doing this to screw me ( and who knows how many other people ) over, or all of the above.

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