Monday, September 16, 2024
In my previous post, I sketched out my objections to retail medical care as epitomized by HMOs.
I know first-hand how one’s life is put at risk when one is forced to endure the deliberate delays imposed on a person by the process of “pre-authorization.” The HMO hope is that delaying treatment will cause you to die before they need to expend any serious money to provide for your care. Such was certainly my case in the summer and fall of 2010, when my heart was obviously inn distress. There was no excuse for a HMO denying me an adequate test for three months. The situation was not helped, of course, by the fact that the HMO doctor I was assigned to was not capable of diagnosing the condition of my heart. Mediocrity, Inc.
As I approached the age when I could free myself from the bondage of HMO strictures, I asked myself why I should risk being assigned to someone I don’t trust just because a HMO is too cheap to provide expedient care by a competent specialist. Yes, HMO “advantage” plans appear to be cheaper, but that’s part of how they recruit “investors” (aka “patients”) to be part of their Ponzi scheme.
Instead, why not sign up for Traditional Medicare with a Medigap policy? Indeed, that is what my spouse and I decided to do. Unfortunately, my spouse was denied a Medicare card! We applied on August 3rd, and on August 14th, she was told “No. You don’t deserve a card.” There was no explanation for the denial. I am 76; she is 71. We both have worked decades during which we were subject to the Medicare tax. We both will lose our group health medical coverage plan on September 30th. We were both told by a Social Security worker at a Social Security office in Garden Grove, California that all the forms we turned in on August 3rd were in proper order, and that we should soon expect our cards.
And then the door gets slammed in our face.
A month has gone by and we have done everything possible to get an explanation, and no one will help us except in the most superficial, perfunctory way. We have spent dozens of hours making phone calls and writing letters and waiting in line. One worker at a Social Security office recently appeared to sit at her computer terminal and type a few sentences into my wife’s file. “My supervisor will probably get to this in about two weeks,” she said. “Next, please.”
That’s it. Social Security won’t do anything more than that. Our group insurance plan expires at the end of the month, and my spouse will have no health insurance to provide for basic care on October 1st. I have worked and been subject to the Medicare tax for over a half-century, and this is how my spouse and I get treated. She, too, worked for many years and paid this tax. It’s an outrage that amounts to a criminal offense on the part of the government.
This outcome is almost more than I can bear. It’s one thing to be young and to be treated badly. It’s quite another to be 76 years old and have to endure the sting of being told, “What a sucker you are! You thought we actually cared about you? Your job is to pay your taxes and shut up. If you end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars because you didn’t have the Medicare coverage you worked your whole life to attain, then that’s your tough luck for being a gullible citizen.”
The irony, of course, is that it’s not as if my hope for my spouse and I to both have Medicare effective on October 1st was because we were getting something for free. Paying a Medicare tax is jut the first installment of this health insurance deal. As everyone should know, Medicare is not free. My spouse and I will pay close to a thousand dollars a month in order to have access to a choice of competent doctors. A thousand dollars a month. This is hardly a cheap health insurance policy.
Vice-President Kamala Harris says that her policy choices are different from Trump’s because she cares about “you.” Here, my dear readers, is an example of how “you” is treated by the U.S. government.
The other election choice, of course, is even worse, since Mr. Turnip has only managed to come up with “a concept of a plan” for health care reform after over nine years of thinking about it. Other than the complete replacement of the Affordable Care Act by a set of insurance companies with no guardrails on their policies whatsoever, I cannot imagine what he has in mind.
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Post-script:
Of course, health care is almost completely a matter of luck. I have had too many doctors either physically abuse me or lie to me — yes, deliberately lie to me — or simply not take seriously my symptoms, to believe that the medical system regards me as I am anything other than a piece of meat to be processed for profit.
About Bill Mohr