One company in particular seems to know better than any medical professional that has ever taken a medical class: Aetna.  You see, Aetna thinks that because the doctor didn’t do a sleep study on me and there is no “official” diagnosis, then he has no right to request that I obtain a prescription to fight the narcolepsy for a month while they line up some time in the clinic.  Therefore, there simply refuse to let me have it.

Oh sure, I could pay for the prescription myself – but if a doctor wrote the prescription, why must the insurance company outright deny the claim?  Better yet, my doctors have to spend time calling and justifying their work and prescription recommendation… which, they did… and… well, Aetna still just doesn’t care.  No narcolepsy drugs for me.

This isn’t the first time Aetna has known better than any of my doctors.  I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I’m going to try to get the doctor to work through the appeals process on this one since the study is still the better part of a month away, but it’s pretty unnerving that health insurance companies, in the interest of the Bottom Line, can screw their customers’ health like this.

Impressive, Aetna.  I can’t wait to get rid of you.  Perhaps I should start an Internet campaign against you.

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Those of you who know me very well know that I’ve been dreaming of putting together a new media company.  Jeff, a longtime friend of mine, shares this dream.  He had the notion to fire up a quick video podcast for the Oscars this year and, despite the extremely tight deadline, he managed to land equipment and a location.  He shot from 10:00pm til 1:30am, then came over to my place to spend another 5 hours in editing.

The end result is what I’m proud to say is our first video podcast produced under the Red Abstract Productions banner.  It has a few rough spots, but I think it’s a good start.

For anyone who is curious – this was shot with a Sony miniDV cam with available light in the movie theater (yeah, I know, we’re working on lights!).  It was all color-corrected in post and edited with iMovie ’09 and Soundtrack Pro on a Mac Pro 8-core with 4gb of RAM.  We had intended to use all of the pro tools (Final Cut Studio 2), but being under the gun for time, we stuck with the basic editor because that’s what we know the best right now.

You can pick up the video podcast here.

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