Health Insurance Makes Me Crazy
thusspakezuska | August 26, 2009I have a friend. She has a daughter. While in college, the daughter was covered on the parents' health insurance policy.
Well, sorta. As part of her college program, the daughter had to do an internship. Hey, that's great! Great experience, maybe a great chance to get a permanent job! Except, as it turns out, the internship does not count as being a full time student for the purposes of health insurance.
My friends, being responsible parents, and additionally being parents with enough disposable income to afford it, took out a health insurance policy for their daughter. They…
thusspakezuska | August 25, 2009Perhaps you might have wondered why I don't blog so much lately. That would be because my full-time job these days is navigating the The Best Health Insurance System In The World!TM on behalf of my elderly mother.
You may recall that a few weeks back, her wallet was stolen, necessitating cancellation of her existing Blue Cross insurance number and issue of a new number and card. If you will recall, I explained that it appeared to providers in the interim as if my mother had no coverage.
Well, I finally received the new card with the new number. I spent a good deal of time this morning…
thusspakezuska | August 14, 2009As I recently reported, my mother's wallet was stolen last week, containing her bank card, driver's license, and insurance and Medicare cards. This has resulted in hours and hours of work for me to deal with replacing the cards, working with the bank to contest the fraudulent charges on her account, etc.
I'm going to tell you something the health insurance company probably won't, because I'm not sure that the people who answer the phones even understand that their system works like this.
When you call to report your lost or stolen insurance card, the insurance company will naturally want…
thusspakezuska | May 21, 2009It can't be avoided. Once a year you make the trek to the gynecologist's office for the annual exam. For various reasons, the whole experience is extremely unpleasant for me, and yet I go, because I try to take care of my health. And hey, I have health insurance! And it pays for the annual exam. Lucky me, I don't even need a referral to see my gynecologist. Though I do get to pay the higher copay for "specialists". This is especially maddening as my primary care physician, a woman I respect and dearly love, could do the exam for me - and does, for many of her other patients - but my…
thusspakezuska | April 30, 2009What's a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends:
Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
This afternoon I've been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich - which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes:
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -…
thusspakezuska | February 16, 2009Whenever I go back home to see my mom, I usually spend some time visiting with her cousin D., who lives in the house across the street from my mother's house. D. has spent a good many years taking care of his elderly mother, my great-aunt. I have known D. all my life. As a child growing up, he was one of my elders. As a young adult, coming back home now and then for visits, I often didn't know what to say to him when our paths would cross, thinking I didn't have much in common with him. Now we are both intimately involved with the care of our elderly mothers and this brings us a…
thusspakezuska | January 21, 2009As if the world needed another example of how the American health insurance system is completely insane, maddening, inefficient...I mean, we've all seen Sicko, right? But let me just share the private hell I've been through recently. I'd like to tell you what happened yesterday, but to do that, I have to go back a month or two.
In November my mother was hospitalized, and then spent time in a rehab hospital. During that time, she had a CT scan that diagnosed blood clots in her lungs. Medicare had approved my mother's stay in the rehab hospital and, presumably, the treatments and…