Namine’s glasses

With her new glasses, Namine looks a little (okay, a lot) more grown up than I’m comfortable with.

Namine’s glasses are just for reading (is that “near-sightedness” or “far-sightedness”? I can never remember), but I am very glad that she is comfortable with the way she looks with them on. That’s more than I could say when I got glasses, and I was much older than she is when I got mine.

We ended up being able to get Namine’s glasses – actually, two different pairs, but I’ll get to that – at no out-of-pocket cost to us. Namine has two insurances, as I’ve already mentioned – private insurance through my job, and Medicaid. (I know it as T19 or Title 19, but it’s also known as SSI Disability. So many names!)

Jessica and I have been getting our glasses at Visionworks for a number of years now, and we’ve never been disappointed. So it made sense to get Namine’s there too; little did we know how wrong we were, but it wasn’t really the store’s fault. In the process of getting her glasses, we’ve been to two different Visionworks stores at least twice, talked to numerous reps, asked them to call my insurance, and called my insurance ourselves.

Finding glasses that my insurance covered wasn’t the problem. The problem lay in which glasses Medicaid covered – which is to say, every single pair that my insurance did. You see, Medicaid has a specific set of frames that it will pay for, and that list is a completely separate entity from what the store makes available on its shelves. They keep the Medicaid-covered frames in a little box under the desk.

Okay, so we thought we’d just check out those frames. So far, Namine has been pretty easy to please, as far as frames go, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. Right? Wrong.

Because Namine has a primary insurance – mine – in order to make a purchase for frames, Visionworks required us to use that before allowing us to use Medicaid. That meant that we had to pick a pair of frames that Medicaid did not cover; under no circumstances would we be allowed to use both insurances on a single pair.

It just so happens that we were able to find a pair of frames that 1) Namine liked, 2) that fit comfortably, and 3) my insurance covered in full. I’d say we lucked out on that one.

Having used my insurance’s coverage of one pair of glasses, we were then able to pick out a pair from the limited selection of Medicaid frames. Since my insurance would not cover these, Medicaid paid for them at no cost to us. Those will be ready in a week or two, and they are actually quite similar in style to the pair we brought home with us yesterday. (Except they’re blue instead of pink.)

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