Cobra Kai!

My husband just changed jobs, so we are in a bit of an insurance no-fly zone. To cover the basics until his benefits kick in, we are on COBRA. While we will eventually get reimbursed for all of our prescriptions and whatnot, the sticker shock at having to pay full price for them is enough to make me hope I don’t get really sick before May.

Let’s take, for example, my birth control pills. I have polycystic ovary syndrome, so getting pregnant required a team of experts, precision timing, and lots of poking with things that were not a penis. While not getting a period is actually a fine problem to have the rest of the time, it isn’t actually healthy. Plus, the price of a monthly pill pack against a monthly pregnancy test “just in case” is well worth it. That is until I actually paid full price for the pills. They cost $85 for 28 pills, seven of which could be replaced with Skittles for all their health benefits. Breaking out my rusty calculator, that equals roughly $4 per day for the 21 days of actual medicinal content.

Or as my husband put it, “Well honey, we might as well get our money’s worth.” No shit! No spin class for me this month, I’ll be too busy riding other equipment, thanks.

At least the pharmacist was willing to let me pay out of pocket for them. It took a week of back and forth to get the local drugstore chain to relinquish my blood pressure medication. (Taken because not only does my body not want to get pregnant, it didn’t want to stay pregnant and is still holding a grudge.) No insurance, no pills! I was so stunned that they didn’t hand the bag over that I just walked right out of the store. I’m sure the week I went without my scrip had a fantastic effect on my health. Eventually my husband took matters into his own hands and paid a grand total of $15 for them. Why does it cost more to stop me from making babies than it does to stop my heart from exploding? Does the need of the one outweigh the need of not making many? Who knows? What I do know is that my beta blocker container is almost empty and I shudder to think how much that is going to cost me to refill.

So, in light of the recent foray into actually paying full price for medicine, I am making my kids wash their hands twice as often and may just start bathing them in Purell. If they so much as sniffle or cough, I’ll start pumping them with every holistic remedy I can find on the Internet. That should work, right?