Universal Medical Care
Fri., March 10, 10:44 AM
It’s not as if I never mentioned health insurance before. But – heaven help me if I look at the greater picture – we, as a nation, are facing big trouble. Some local labor problems are pointing up what we knew all along: smaller companies can’t afford to provide their employees with adequate health insurance, and the corporations that can afford it are finding ways to wiggle out of it. The people most affected by it are not senior citizens (surprise, surprise). They’re the ones who are not quite old enough to qualify for Medicare. If they lose their jobs, they won’t be able to find other work at the same level; age discrimination is illegal but that hasn’t stopped anyone yet. And they can’t afford private insurance, even if the private companies will accept them. (U.D., in her thirties, was turned down by the same company that had covered her when she had an employer who would pay for it!)
What’s left? Well, you can gamble that you or your family won’t get sick. Yeah, right. All that does is force you to put off regular exams until you’re so broken it’s going to cost more to fix you. Or else, you can give up something else – your car maybe – and pay for the really expensive private insurance. If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, you know that I was paying more than $1,000 a month for insurance.
I’m not saying it wasn’t good insurance. It covered my medications and my doctor’s appointments and my testing supplies. It certainly took care of me during my cancer treatments. But I was drawing on savings to pay for it – it cost more than I made in a year. What would I have done if I hadn’t any savings?
Well, I’m doing all right now, but what are we going to do about everyone else? It’s obvious that we need some kind of Great Insurance Fund to make sure people get the care they need. The necessary monies should come several sources: companies assessed to pay some amount for each employee; individuals who could afford some contribution (but not at the expense of their kids’ food and clothing); and, yes, some kind of governmental help. The problems is, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better, because the so-called economic experts can’t get their heads out of…
Consider how well they’ve done so far on the Medicare prescription plan. For starters, they promised information by October 1, 2005. There wasn’t any. Early announcements pointed us to medicare.org; I don’t know why it wasn’t medicare.gov, but it doesn’t make any difference, because neither one had any information.
We began to see some ads from companies who would like to sell us Medicare supplemental insurance. I don’t want that; in the twelve years since Husband has been on Medicare, despite his many illnesses, I don’t think I’ve ever had a year when I had to pay more than the supplemental would have cost me. I ain’t going there.
Medicare/Social Security sent out questionnaires to see whether we were eligible for free prescription insurance. There were pages of questions, but I realized that the answer was in the first question; we are not eligible for that level of aid. It took M/SS four letters to tell us so. November 15, the first day one could sign up, came and went, and we still had no solid information. This year’s Medicare and You arrived – two copies, since we’re both collecting – a hundred or so pages of information that was substantially the same as last year and the year before. Around page 92 I began to find some kind of guidelines; that was helpful, but one doesn’t sign up through Medicare but through a private provider, so my hands were still tied.
Toward the end of November, we received useful information from a couple of companies, including the formularies. You can’t do anything without the formularies, because those are the lists that tell you whether or not your personal prescription medications are included. I would have signed us up for two separate companies if necessary, but one company turned out to be appropriate for both. I enrolled us in the middle of December, so that we could start claiming by January 1, 2006, as promised.
For Husband and me, despite the difficulties, it’s working. I do want to point out that it can be done. For less than $25 a month each, we are saving about $500 a month in prescription costs. I feel rich.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people it has not been working. Phoning the private insurance companies has put them into phone queues for hours. Reaching a person to talk to was no guarantee; if you weren’t ready to sign up, the “customer support” people didn’t know how to do anything else. (Trying to correct an error on my husband’s name was nearly impossible; the girl not only couldn’t help me, she didn’t know how to transfer the call!) The web pages for those companies simply offered the telephone number.
That was for those of us in the “middle tier.” What about those who couldn’t afford the private providers? I’ve heard that M/SS didn’t seem to be able to help them at all. What about those who already had some kind of private insurance already, whether it was Medicare supplemental or something else? There’s this horror story of an expensive insurance company that still couldn’t train its customer support to do something as simple as (gasp!) support the customers. I wrote about it myself, but you might as well go to the source.
My point is, we know that it could be done for everyone, but it won’t be done. Save your money, my friends, you’re gonna need it. Something as necessary as taking care of our citizens is too difficult for the government or the insurance industry. A service can only be as good as the people who deliver it, and those people can only do what they’ve been taught to do. In the interest of saving money (if it does), the managers have “dumbed down” the process for the telephone crew. Once again, it boils down to stupidity.
And it makes my blood boil!
