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Health Wealth Stealth We Got Nothin' [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2023-05-30
You know, when I was a kid and I used to look at my Gram’s Medicare EOBs, I used to reconcile her bank accounts and EOB vs. Still Liable, which made me swear hard and often at her physician of choice. Simple enough, back then, Part A, Part B, and what’s left once your supplemental kicks in. Mind your EOB’s. Which are mostly full of BS, but still useful when it comes to accounting purposes.
Her doctor was an a**hole. And a sanctimonious one, to boot. When she had a stroke (she didn’t answer the phone one night after Wheel of Fortune, and since she always answered me, I drove the 2 minutes from my house to hers, caught her totally nonverbal), and I realized that she couldn’t tell me what was wrong. I bundled her off to the hospital (the one where my Great Uncle used to be Chairman of the Board), and the Very First Thing that Smart Guy Doctor wanted to do, even before 2 days had passed, was to g-tube her.
Also, he didn’t want to wait for her secondary insurance to pay him for normal routine office visits, so he insisted that my Gram fork over $7.55 ever time she visited him. She could wait for the money, gimme mine now. Jerk. I let him wait for secondary payments from when he saw her in the hospital. Because I’m nice like that.
I said to him, upon his mention of a g-tube, “Absolutely not, I promised her that I wouldn't allow that,” and he got shitty with me. He literally dragged me out of her room by my arm, and asked me if a heparin drip would be okay, if blah de blah would be okay, and he spoke Medical to me, as though I didn’t speak the language, and I told him if he tried to g-tube her, we would resume this conversation in the WWF ring, because I’d fight him every step of the way, and I didn’t care about how the local park was named for his wife, seeing as how he’d been running around with his nurse since Forever and Two Days.
And I never saw him again.
But my Gram had real Medicare, Parts A & B. My Honey, who is my primary concern these days, Gram having passed almost 20 years ago (during which time her property taxes increased from $900/year to $10,000/year), does not have traditional Medicare.
Nope. You see, Honey got sick and nearly died from bladder cancer and the subsequent infection from improper stitching before he was even 55; I’m repeating myself here, if you’ve read anything I’ve written, you know that we are now doing Round 2 of cancer treatment. The New and Not Improved Kind of Cancer Treatment.
And I’m most greviously annoyed, because I know that, if one becames disabled before one hits Official Medicare, the Supplemental Insurance Industry will definitely Point and Laugh at you for being disabled young. You shoulda hadda oughta have taken better care. Seriously. They do everything but heckle you. So when Honey’s bladder cancer gone wrong operation, and subsequent sepsis infection left us in the hospital for an entire summer, we were SOL. This is what rendered him unable to work, since it’s difficult to even be a Walmart greeter when you can’t stand upright because your entire abdominal area is one giant hole. You’re going, “Yeesh?” You shoulda been there.
My beef today is that his Part C intermediary does not seem to want to keep up with appropriate treatment intervals. Never mind that they swore to Gawd that I had cancelled his Advantage Plan effective 3/1/2023, while he was in the hospital, mid-treatment for new sarcomas. And they reinstated said insurance effective April 1, new policy, effectively leaving us on the hook for the entirely of march, of inpatient cancer treatment. With a repeat of sepsis, necessitating an additional 2 weeks in the hospital. Oh, yeah, and they called me a liar, when I said that didn’t happen.
*waves at Humana*
Yeah, you said that I cancelled our policy with you, when all I did was question your willingness to actually, you know, treat him for this new and really evil and aggressive sarcoma.
Hey, Humana? You want to see evil and aggressive? Keep blocking Honey’s treatment.
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