One of my prescriptions is now $2,000/year!

I got bad news when I went to refill one of my prescriptions last week. I now have to pay $2,000 for it. Previously my out of pocket cost was zero.

What changed? My company changed insurance carriers effective January 1. Although both my old plan and my new plan are HDHPs/HSAs with similar specs on paper, one of the hard-to-figure-out-in-advance details was that the new insurer, United HealthCare, has far fewer drugs on its maintenance/preventive drug list than my previous insurer, Anthem Blue Cross. With Anthem all the prescriptions I take were covered at no cost to me as part of their preventive care. With United HealthCare seemingly nothing is considered preventive care. One prescription I refilled a few weeks ago was merely $100/year. But this other one is a whopping $2,000.

What am I doing? Well, it's fortunate that this suddenly costly medication isn't life-or-death for me. In fact it's not clear it's even doing much for me. It treats a condition but it only improves it a little. I will make an appointment with my doctor to discuss alternatives that are more effective— and hopefully way less expensive!

9 Weeks Without A Flight

Today it's been 9 weeks since I boarded a flight or entered an airport. Aside from the depths of the pandemic in March 2020 through early 2021 when I didn't see the inside of an airport or airplane for almost 15 months, 9 weeks is a long time for me. I remember thinking years ago when I'd gone 8 weeks without a flight that I'd wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, put my shoes into a bin on the end of the bed, and look for the metal detector to walk through. Well, the pandemic era scrambled expectations of normalcy, so this 9 weeks of grounding snuck up on me.

I do have several trips planned. The first is a short business trip in a few weeks. By then my flightless streak will have stretched to 11 weeks. But then my spouse and I have a leisure trip 6 weeks after that at the start of April, plus another leisure trip 3 weeks after the first. We have leisure trips planned in the summer and fall, too.

Update: Minutes after I posted this joking description of "flight withdrawal" I started having actual chills & shakes! 😱