Aetna denied my appeal

I’m looking for some insight on my situation, thanks to anyone in advance who takes the time to read this. This might be long too and I’m on mobile so sorry! I’m (27F) in Texas by the way and have RA.

So I recently went part time for work so that I could go back to school full time, which meant I lost insurance through my work (at the moment I work around 24-27 hours a week). With my work insurance, I didn’t have this problem with any medications. The premiums were quite high but everything else was fine. A few months ago I applied through the marketplace and now have Aetna. I made sure that they cover all my medications before I applied but I’ve found out after the fact that this doesn’t actually mean anything for sure, unfortunately.

All the rest of my medications are covered but one of them requires a pre authorization. I’ve been on this particular medication for about 3 years now and I will get very, very sick without it. I was not expecting there to be any issues with the pre auth honestly, but I found out that the insurance rejected it when I called this past Friday for an update. The lady I spoke to over the phone also mentioned that she was kind of surprised it was rejected because my doctor did a verbal pre authorization. I don’t really understand why she said that, because it seems like this happens a lot.

Anyway, I of course called my doctor and left a voicemail explaining the situation but wasn’t feeling very hopeful about it at this point since I was already denied the first time around. My doctor did appeal it and took the time to write a letter and was very thorough about explaining everything. Still got denied. I guess I’m just also ranting right now because I’m feeling upset and frustrated. I’ve never had an issue with this before but my work insurance was the only other insurance I’ve ever had until now, so I’m not familiar with insurance in general and this was a real rude awakening for me that things like this happen to a lot of people. My doctor told me that they just don’t want to pay it. I’m not sure there’s really much else I can do and at this point I’m trying to figure out how to navigate this. Like if I’m better off going back to work full time and trying to manage both work & school or seeing what other alternatives I have to make this work for me… so I could really just use some advice and different perspectives.