This year’s MVP health plan has a different “OTC Benefit” than last year, even though MVP is contracting with the same company to provide what seems to be essentially the same benefit.
This arrived half a year after the new OTC benefit card showed up:
I suppose somebody noticed MVP hadn’t gotten around to telling us they were cancelling the old card, despite its Valid Thru 12/26 notation. Well, the card isn’t exactly cancelled, it just stopped working when all the money evaporated.
This not being my first ride in this particular rodeo, I spent all those sweet OTC benny bucks days after they become valid on the first day of every quarter-year, buying up my stock of overpriced OTC stuff.
In theory, you could buy the stuff elsewhere, but you had to scan each item in the retail store using the worst app imaginable to determine its eligibility and coverage. If the store was in a no-wireless-data phone zone: too bad, so sad.
This year’s program is simpler: you must buy everything from the sole-source supplier, even though it costs four times more than the comparable item at, say, Walmart or even Amazon.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Take it from someone who has spent my entire adult life working in the healthcare industrial complex. If the industry could profit from selling hard drugs to the most vulnerable among us, they would. Oh wait…
As awful as socialized medicine is, at least it’s not designed from the ground up for human farming
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to ascribe what’s happening to simple incompetence. :sigh: