Thank God I get to Hate TriCare!

I am so TO'ed right now, (see Napoleon Dynamite for this reference). I really am! Thank God we have a decent insurance coverage through TriCare. I'm not sure we could survive medical bills if we didn't have it. I don't know how people do it without insurance. I also don't know how people pay hundreds of dollars per month for insurance costs. So let me preface this by saying THANK GOD we have medical insurance and that it's so cheap.

Now let me totally b*tch about it! Today I took GraceAnne to the Dr because she's had a cough for 2 weeks now. I thought it was just allergies because she sometimes has issues with post-nasal drip, so I put it off and put it off. But yesterday and today I woke up with a sore throat and the baby has been coughing, too, so I took her in. After waiting a good HOUR between the waiting room and the exam room, (don't you love waiting so long that your kid is hungry again, even though you JUST ate before you came? Yeah, I do, too.) FINALLY, the Dr. looked her over and said she's totally fine other than a little bit of pinkness in her throat. She said, "the strep-screen was negative, so..." I said, "wait a minute...she didn't get a strep-screen." The nurse had said she was going to come back to swab her throat but never did. So they came and did the swab and said, "six minutes." So 20 minutes later I walked out there and asked if it was done. They said, "oh yeah...it's positive" FAN FREAKIN TASTIC! So they sent the Dr in to talk to us again and it took her 30 more minutes to get in there and MAN was I mad when she told me the baby "probably doesn't have it" and I "shouldn't be worried." I asked her what to look out for and she said, "well, usually nasal drainage." BUT GraceAnne's nose has been dry as a bone, so my guess is this is not a typical strain. UGH. So I asked her if I should get tested...she said, "strep is not so easily-passed as we'd like to think" UMM...then she said, "only be worried if she's in the baby's face a lot or if you guys kiss on each other lots. HELLO!? OF COURSE we kiss on each other--we're family. OF COURSE she's in Vi's face every 2 seconds--Vi's her favorite play thing!

So I got home after an infuriating time at the Dr's office and Allan is home. He is laying on the couch because he feels "drugged." He checks his temp and it's over 101. FANTASTIC! So I call our primary care manager (PCM from now on), and they have NO CLUE what I'm talking about when I ask for a Rapid Strep test. She said, and I quote, "I have no idea what they did, but there's no way to test for strep in 6 minutes! It would take DAYS to grow a culture." and that we can't get in until tomorrow anyway. I said, "I don't have days. If the baby is getting it I need to be on antibiotics NOW." So I call Tricare and they tell me tough sh*t so I call Ennis Regional and they say they can do it for 84$ each. WTF? So I call Tricare again to see if they'll just pay for us to go and get labs at Ennis Regional and they say, "not without a Dr. authorization" so I call our PCM and ask them to write a referral and she says, "no way. We'd need at least a week to get a referral done, because Tricare is so hard to get a referral from...they're VERY hard to get to cooperate." AS IF I HADN'T NOTICED THIS! So I called Tricare again to see if there's ANYTHING I can do and get told tough sh*t again. But then the PCM calls us back and "OH, did you mean a strep SCREEN? Because we can do those." Can you see my face turning a thousand shades of red right now?!

Long story short? Allan is going to skip school tomorrow so we can go get strep SCREENS done and get some antibiotics and probiotics running through our systems. We'll only have to pay 12$ each for our co-pays and 3$ each for the script. I'm thrilled to have insurance, but did I REALLY need to go through all that for exactly what I asked for in the first place? *sigh*