Tag Archives: coverage

The post in which I don’t bitch about health insurance…

Posted on by

I know the hip thing to do is bitch about health insurance and the American medical system on social media. There seems to be an entire cottage industry dedicated to telling us how awful everything this. My experience over the last year has been the polar opposite of the narrative I’ve seen being pushed across the internet. 

About a month ago, I got a notice that BlueCross didn’t want to pay for my 30-day heart monitor. Frankly, with the $10,000 bill associated with it, I didn’t exactly want to pay it either. But, as it was “not medically necessary,” according to their note, they weren’t going to pay. That’s despite two cardiologists deciding that that level of monitoring was, in fact, medically necessary. 

After several long conversation with me – and presumably even longer discussions with people representing the hospital system and the test provider, it looks like BlueCross ended up paying out about $3,000 as the “insurance rate.” I just paid $36 as my portion, and everyone now appears to be satisfied that they’ve done their due diligence and has gotten a fair shake. 

I honestly was expecting more of a fist fight on that. Who really knows? It may yet come back to rear its ugly head, but for now I’m considering it a win.

Look, I’ve learned a lot about health insurance in the last year. It’s not an ideal system. It requires you to keep a very close eye on your treatment plan and everyone involved in it. Even more so, it means staying on top of your insurance provider, knowing their terms of service and the ins and outs of your policy, and questioning everything that doesn’t pass the common sense test. That’s just the baseline starting point to participate in the system. I don’t know that it would be any less complex under single payer. Under any universe of care, I expect that I would want to be very aware of what was happening and the services that were being provided on my behalf. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Rabbit holes. I’ve lived these last 43 years without ever needing much more than my regular checkups and copays. Despite that, I recently went down an internet rabbit hole reading about my insurance plan’s catastrophic health coverage and how to avoid out-of-network charges. I mean it’s nice to know and surely will come in useful someday, but there’s an hour or two of my week I’ll never get back.

2. Normal. Turn to any news provider and you’re bound to hear stories about “getting back to normal” or “the new normal” or “life after COIVD” or “life with COVID.” Most of those stories turn on the same general theme of wanting something analogous to pre-pandemic life to return as close to immediately as possible. Personally, I’m in no rush… although that could be because most of what I’ve enjoyed during the Great Plague are the same things I enjoyed doing back in the Before Times. The only significant change I’ll notice in getting to whatever “normal” looks like in the future will be inevitably spending more time commuting and sitting in a cubicle. If you’re waiting on me to do handsprings about that kind of normal, it’s like you don’t even know me.

3. Mud. I plant grass seed in the back yard every spring and fall. Jorah, on the other hand, spends all four seasons doing his best to turn everything inside the fence line into a sodden morass. It’s not entirely his fault. The soil is thin and surprisingly bad – mostly clay and rocky – so what grows there doesn’t grow thick. Being a deeply shaded area, at least a third of the green is moss rather than grass. The minute it’s disturbed, it opens a gash and mud ensues. I only bring it up because his favorite thing to do on rainy days is go every outside at full speed kicking up mud like some kind of teenaged bubba with a lifted F-150. That’s fine outside, I suppose, but it’s current on him, the floors, a couple of walls, and a bit of the ceiling from when he had a good shake. 

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

Posted on by

1. Training. A month or two ago I made a concerted effort to knock out all the mandatory online training I was supposed to get done this year. Generally, figuring out how to sign on to the system is far more difficult and time consuming than the actual training, but fine. Every week, though, some new ridiculous “important mandatory training requirement” gets added. Look, I’m a bureaucrat, I’ll waste an hour or two doing whatever the bosses decide is important, but could we at least pile all up so I can blast through it in a day or two instead of inflicting slow death by a thousand cuts?

2. “First Amendment” violations. I feel like I have to say this once every three months, but Facebook literally can’t infringe upon your First Amendment right to free speech. Facebook is a publicly traded company, not a branch of government. They’re free to do whatever they want on their platform – including flagging and deleting anything that doesn’t conform to the broadest possible interpretation of their established terms of service. No company is no more required to let you use their intellectual property as a soapbox than I am to let you stand on my front porch spouting nonsense. If you don’t like the terms under which Facebook lets you use their platform, the answer is to stop using it and find an alternative… because ranting and raving about Facebook violating your rights makes you sound like a moron.

3. Election 2020. We’re exactly two months away from the 2020 general election. I was occasionally checking in prior to the conventions, but with the ongoing tantrum throwing by candidates and surrogates, go ahead and color me uninterested. I haven’t missed voting in an election since I first registered in 1996 – and I have no intention of missing this one – but there’s absolutely nothing currently being bandied about across traditional, social, or alternative media that I find helpful in any way. Honestly, I can’t believe we’re paying good money for this abject fuckery.

Things you miss when they’re not there…

Posted on by

I learned two very important lessons today. The first is that I can spend eight hours at work and not have access to a computer and not feel like I’m missing all that much… Especially when the nice lady down the row prints off the important stuff and hand delivers it to me. I can’t say the same thing for working in a place that has some of the worst cell phone coverage in the industrialized world. Seriously. My phone went between one bar, searching, and no coverage randomly throughout the day. And when there was coverage, it wasn’t 3G. Yeah. That slow.

You don’t realize how much you rely on your cellie day-to-day, especially when you have a working computer to keep yourself distracted. When suddenly it’s the only commo you have and it’s not working with any reliability, you find yourself in for a long day. And no, the irony of a massive communication hub being smack dab in the middle of a dead zone isn’t lost on me in the least. That’s just Sam doing his thing.