VSL#3 DS denied by insurance

according to my insurance company (Bluecross blueshield alabama), vsl#3 and the ds version is a " Medical food supplements not covered as a Major Medical benefit"(their words not mine). I emailed the customer rep back saying that I do reap major medical benefits from it (I've been buying the over the counter version for about 3 months and it's helped me a lot; I am going to ask my doctor for a prescription for ds this week). She then emailed back saying "If you or your doctor have any published Peer Review literature, you can submit it to our Medical Policy area for review" and gave me an address. Somehow I doubt that they would pay careful attention or give a timely response even if I went through all the effort of finding studies, printing them out and mailing it to them. I'm from outside the US and I've never dealt with an insurance company before. Any help on how I go about this problem? I've seen that there are people who have vsl3ds covered by insurance (even if they do pay somewhat high copay compared to other medications) and it would help if I did too.

I have Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois and they cover it, although I paid a $70 copayment for 20 packets of the VSL#3DS, so it's still expensive. I know that the companies are run separately but I feel like you should be able to take issue with the fact that another BCBS covers it and yours pretends that they've never heard of it.

sorry for the double post and thanks for the replies. I'll actually chime in a little on the answer. I called up customer service again instead of asking the same person over email, and this time a different lady said that it would be covered as a non preferred brand which would mean 75 dollars copay for me. Since they have a hard time even finding this thing on their system, everyone seems to be a little unsure. I'll get the prescription, go to the pharmacy and see how it goes. So for anyone else who might be having trouble with insurance about this, I say just ask multiple times or just go to the pharmacy and have them try to get the correct information.

we'll have to see what happens once i get my prescription in at walgreens but yeah, 75 dollars would be great. Up until now I bought the regular version for 88 dollars a box. I don't know if this is true with other people here but my insurance company has categorized most mesalamines (Colazal, lialda, apriso) as non preferred (meaning 75 dollars copay) and only asacol as preferred. I mean I get that they have the same active ingredients but they're very different except for that and only colazal has a generic alternative (which seems to not be as good as the brand name), so very frustrating that they're doing this. I

wow you're so lucky. I thought bluecross was like one of the good insurance companies in the US but they really suck right now; they changed their policy this september and basically my deductibles went up 15 dollars for preferred brand and doubled for nonpreferred; adding the fact that they're too stupid to actually care that the mesalamine formulas are all very different is just absolute fail.