health insurance sorted out, at least for now

Adrian went to the pharmacy and picked up my prescriptions. One of them was run last year, and they charged a copay of fifteen cents, which I think is the lowest I've ever been charged. Yes, mirtazapine is an inexpensive generic, but that still surprised me. This year's insurance has zero copay for "tier 1" drugs, but they ran this prescription last month, on the old insurance. The pharmacist said they'd run my other prescription on that insurance yesterday, which seems odd but I'm not going to worry about.

Adrian then waited in another line to give them her and my new insurance cards and numbers, and they told her that the insurance company had taken care of it for us, which surprised me. The pharmacy returned my second phone call about this a couple of minutes after Adrian told me it was taken care of, which I told them when they started to run through the questions to confirm my identity.

ETA: I just checked whether the dental insurance part of my new health insurance covers out-of-network dentists. The answer is yes, which I learned during a slightly frustrating conversation with someone at their call center. Quite a few plans don't, including both my and Adrian's old plans.

Even straightforward calls to health insurance companies can be draining, and I had to repeat myself a bit on this one, but now I have the basic information.

Public Domain Day 2025

This article celebrating Public Domain Day is mostly about works that entered the public domain in the US on Jan. 1, but it also covers some works that were already in the public domain. For Magritte's famous painting of a pipe, The Treachery of Images, they're at "probably public domain, but we're still looking into it," because what legal definition of "published" (and hence publication date) for paintings was "murky" and "not well-defined." (via conuly)