As you may remember, I went about 18 months without insurance. During that time I had to buy strips and insulin out of pocket and I also received a lot of items from people throughout the DOC because of how awesome everyone is. One thing that I didn’t have to deal with during that time was insurance companies and mail order pharmacies.
Since I getting insurance back after getting married in July, I’ve been dealing with OptumRX as the mail order pharmacy and it has been nothing but a nightmare. I really hate having to complain about companies on the blog, because I want to keep things positive and not just reflect on the negatives, but some times, you hit a boiling point and something needs to be said.
In just over 6 months of dealing with OptumRX I have had the wrong type on insulin shipped, the correct insulin shipped, but the wrong amount, having to change my password everytime I login online, prescription refills not being listed on the website so I have to call and wait on hold, 3 faxes from doctor before they finally “received” it, and now… this.
Yes, that is how my test strip order was received. This is the order that took almost 3 weeks because they were not receiving the fax from my doctor. I did run out of strips and was using some leftover Contour strips that I had during this time period, which is primarily my fault for thinking that I could get more strips within 1-2 weeks. I was excited to get my first order of the Verio strips so I can continue to use the meter after I only had 10 trial strips to begin with.
This isn’t just a full blown bash against OptumRX. I did call them right away and after speaking with 4 different people, they told me that they would send me replacement boxes with a return label to return the damage ones. I was told, “we will just ship them regular mail because some of the boxes weren’t damaged.” Even though that statement is correct, I don’t know if it’s just me, but when you screw something up because of poor packaging, I shouldn’t have to wait another week to get it back.
All in all I can’t stand having to pick up the phone to call OptumRX for something.
I had a less-than-positive experience with OptumRx, although not like yours. In my case, it was the fact that Optum charged more than Medco did for the same medicine, and the markup was a lot. I could have filled the same medicine at CVS, Target, Walmart, or Walgreens for 150% less, so I wrote to the CEOs of both United Healthcare and OptumRx (a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Healthcare) and asked them to match the lower price I could get at many other pharmacies without much effort. It was like talking to a wall. Needless to say, I instructed them to transfer the script to a mail-order pharmacy that would give me the lower price. But Walmart’s mail order pharmacy had to initiate the Rx transfer, OptumRx acted as if transfers were highly unusual (in fact, its routine; I’ve done it many times when switching from Caremark to Medco, etc.). Long story short: I think the pharmacy benefits managers like OptumRx, whether owned by an insurance company or not, all stink. I don’t especially like mail-order pharmacies anyway but I deal with it because the price incentives are so great.
optumrx is the most incompetent ignorant dangerous company on earth in my opinion, will never ever use them again for anything