Dag Nabit

So just over two months ago, I finally paid off all my credit card debt.

Which -- you know -- that had taken me, even with filing bankruptcy, something on the order of twenty-five years.  But it was gone at last, y'all.

Now, this month, a crown (my share, just over five hundred dollars), and this "procedure," as we're calling it, for my ulcer (my share, just over eight hundred dollars) and the car blew a tire, thanks to the charming Fuck Smith roads (that's barely a hit, in the scheme of things, but still, close to a hundred bucks, since we got the oil changed as well).

Much of this I hope to shit I will eventually get back from the fucking HSA account, once the fucking insurance company stops being asshats.

Meanwhile, yeah, I now have credit card debt again.

Fuckit.

American Medicine: Best In the World

So I have to get this root canal, right?

Luckily I have dental insurance. Right?

Except in July my kid had her wisdom teeth taken out.  Which I paid for with my Health Savings Account.

Ai.

American health insurance being what it is, when you use it, you're fucked.  (Apparently you're supposed to have it, not use it.)  I used the benefit card that came with my HSA, which triggered this audit function, and froze the card.  Since July, y'all, I've been fighting with the HSA company about the $625.00 co-pay which was our share of having the kid's wisdom teeth removed.

The HSA benefit card is still frozen.  Oh, and our deductible is still not yet met.  (Yes, even after paying $625 in July.) So Tuesday I have to go in for this root canal and pay $258.00 (my share of the root canal) out of pocket.  I have it in the HSA, but I can't access it, because the benefits card is still frozen.

(Why is it still frozen?  Because the insurance company -- yes, the same insurance company that controls the benefits card -- had not, until about a week ago, issued the EOB on the wisdom tooth question.  Now it has, but it will take four to six weeks to unfreeze the benefits card.  Explain to me one time why socialized medicine is worse than this?)

Then next week, I will have to pay out $421 dollars for my ulcer procedure.

Did I mention we owe almost $2000 in back taxes?

MURICA!

FUCK I HATE PAIN

For those of you who have not kept up (what's the DEAL WITH YOU PEOPLE, can't you FOCUS) I've got bone spurs in my shoulder again.

No, that's not right. I've got bone spurs, again, in a different shoulder. The other shoulder.

Whatever. I'm in too much fucking pain to be coherent. Or to spell, apparently. This fucking spell check keeps getting sassy with me.

I've got a medical appointment with my doctor for June 14, with is approximately an eternity from now, but I'm fairly certain I will be given insufficient pain meds, if I get given any pain meds at all, because that's how Arkansas is with pain drugs these days.

I know, from the last time this happened, that after I have surgery, the pain will, after the six or seven weeks of healing it takes, go away. So -- what are we talking? Two weeks to the appointment, a month or two for the requisite tests, a month or two to schedule the surgery, about two months to recover...

Yeah. An eternity of this.

Then I'll be fine.

I actually was doing all right until this afternoon -- I was planning to hold out until January, when our medical savings kicked over. But I was shutting the door of the car to come home and turned my arm funny and OH MY CHRIST, I don't know what I did, but something popped and tore in my shoulder and so much for that plan.

In case I haven't mentioned it lately, let me remind you: I hate American health care.

American Health Care, I Hate You

So, as long-time readers of this blog probably recall, a few years ago I had my right shoulder operated on, to remove several bone spurs.

Previous to that surgery, I endured months of -- how shall I express this -- amazing agony. Aside from gallstones, I don't think I've ever had anything hurt the way these spurs in my shoulder did. Maybe migraines. But the migraines go away with the right drugs. No amount of pain drugs took away the pain in my shoulder. This pain in my shoulder took over my life.

The surgery -- horrible surgery, the worst I've ever undergone, debilitating, difficult to recover from, painful in its own right -- worked perfectly. My shoulder was fixed. No more pain, 100% mobility, strength, no problems.

Well, one problem: over the past month, I'm having similar symptoms in my left shoulder.

No issue, right? Just go see my physician, get it fixed? An awful surgery, sure, but we know the problem, we know the cure, we know it works, it's clearly not very risky, what's the issue?

The issue is Dr. Skull has a cataract, which will use up the last of our medical savings account for the year. So we're out of medical money. And our health insurance covers only 80% of surgical costs.

So I could get my shoulder fixed, now. And then we wouldn't be able to eat or pay power bills for the rest of the year.

Or I can wait until January -- which is only, what, six months now? -- when the new medical money kicks in; and do it then.

And hope next year there's no medical emergency someone needs money for.

Except the kid needs glasses, and so do I, and so will Dr. Skull, after the eye surgery. Who knows where that money will come from. Our health insurance doesn't cover that.

This must be the wise decision making -- that medical rationing -- that the GOP is always talking about. I get to live in pain for six months, and my kid gets to live half-blind until January, so that the insurance executives can be a couple dollars richer.

Sounds like a fine system to me.

Oh, So That's Why...

We did our taxes yesterday.  Why we are so very broke becomes a little clearer -- between jobs he lost and jobs I did (because the university cut down on summer teaching), we made nearly twenty thousand dollars less this year than we did last.  

In fact, we made so little this year that we qualified for that Working Families Tax Credit gizmo.

Which -- good shit, that's all I have to say.

No wonder I can't afford to buy shoes.

And -- here's the really bad news -- Dr. Skull (that's his official new blog name) needs a root canal and a crown.  Which dentists in Fuck Smith want the money for that up front, of course.  Our insurance (we do have dental insurance, but it sucks) covers some fragment of it -- about half of the first $1200, as I recall, and then nothing after that.  There's a yearly $1200 cap on dental with our charming insurance.

But!  Good news!  I don't actually like shoes!

Surely tomorrow will be a better day.

Healthcare Now!

This from DailyKos is your MustRead today.

I was at a party last night (I know! Me at a party!  WTF!), about a dozen of us, graduate students, professors, two ornithologists (yes! really! they are part of the team tracking the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker!), media specialists, a guy who used have a lucrative career with Cox Cable before he got fucked by downsizing, and we had been drinking and talking birds and universities and politics and our wicked youths, the sorts of things one does discuss in NW Arkansas at this sort of party, but invariably, as usual these days, the party devolved to the discussion of hospitals, doctors, and medical debt. 

Everyone of us at that party, and nearly all of us, mind you, had actual jobs, and all of us had actual insurance, but all of us are up to our chins in medical debt, and most of us have been turned over to collection agencies by various doctors and hospitals: this despite have insurance, this despite paying on the medical bills we have to the best of our ability (not very well, since medical bills and medical insurance are now eating up about a fifth of my take-home income).  We're standing there in a huddle at the party swapping tactics on how to deal with collection agencies and hospital billing departments, desperate as outlaws, people who have, in fact, paid for their health care, because none of us had ever missed an insurance payment, while meanwhile the insurance companies, last I heard, post larger and larger profits, as do the drug companies.

Then?  This year?  I get the fine news from my university that they will be raising our insurance premiums.  Oh yay.

Pass the damn bill.

More On Healthcare

The Free Clinics came to Arkansas.

These are the same folk that take free medical care to third world countries, and took them to LA a while ago.  They went to Little Rock, and, as usual, had people lined up for hours.

No health care crisis in this country, nah.

Health Care For Me

So, bad news first: I have what might be a torn rotator cuff and, in entirely unrelated news, Lyme's disease.  Yay me!  Lyme's disease, if you catch it early and hit it hard enough with enough antibiotic (doxycilian, I think?), should cause no lasting problems, though the bull's-eye rash on my knee is so impressive everyone at the clinic had to be called in to view it, and my doctor wanted to take a picture.

The rotator cuff, well: that is causing me serious...no, serious is not the word.  Agonizing?  Vicious?  Amazing?  Astounding pain.  Who knew pain could reach this level?  Me with my migraines and childbirth stories and remember I had gall-bladder issues.  This is a whole new place of pain!  Oh boy!

I've got a fat new bottle of Vicodin and I can see already it won't last long.  Ten of them got me through last night.  mr. delagar kept thumping (I was wailing in my sleep) telling me, "Go take another one."  (I was drugged enough to sleep but not enough to let him sleep.)

The good news?  Our University just, like two months ago, got us a semi-socialized clinic.  Yay!  So I do actually have medical care.

This is opposed to all summer long, when I did not, because the doctors we had been seeing cut us off because we were unable to pay off what we owed them at the rate they thought we ought to be paying them.  (We owed twenty-five hundred dollars, that's over and above what the insurance had already paid, which I was paying off at the rate of fifty a month, that's all I could manage, considering mr. delagar's a diabetic and I'm on five different meds, so our monthly medical expenses are already fairly steep -- fifty a month was not enough: one day when I called for an appointment, they wanted me to give them five hundred dollars: that day, right then, or they were giving us no further medical treatment.  I offered them two hundred, all I had left in the bank just then.  Nope.  Five hundred or fuck off.  I pointed out I needed my prescriptions refilled, that I was a cancer survivor, and that these prescriptions were necessary, that I would die, literally, without them.  Fine, they said, cough up five hundred dollars then.)

I love American Health Care, don't you?

Anyway, I went to a doc in the box, and got the scripts refilled, but we had been doing without health care since.  (The docs above turned us over to a collection agency, even though I continued to pay fifty dollars every month.)

Now we have our university-sponsored semi-socialized health-care clinic, where the doctors don't do anything but practice medicine, where I never have to wait three hours to see the doctor (as I usually did at the previous place), where I don't get told, every third or fourth call, as I always did at the last place, that the doctor is "too busy" to see me, so I'll have to try a doc in the box if I'm "really sick," where I have to do research beforehand myself and tell the doctor what the problem is, if I don't want to end up paying for five or six hugely expensive tests I won't need, because the doctor is too busy to actually figure out what is wrong with me, and is taking the shotgun approach to medicine.

Also? because it's semi-socialized medicine, which means the university sort-of owns it?  Our health insurance totally covers it.  I get bills, but every single one of them says Patient Owes $OO.OO.

Boy, do I like reading that.

Health Care Blues

I've been ailing lately -- not seriously, mind you.  I damaged my shoulder getting out of the white chair in our front room (the only comfortable chair in the house, it used to be white: we bought it when the kid was four months old, and I told mr delagar it was a bad idea -- we have an infant and you're buying a white chair? I said.  We just won't let her on it with food, he claimed.  Ho ho ho ho ho.) and now, a month and nine or ten bottles of anti-inflammatory meds later, the doctor tells me I have damaged tendons and maybe bursitis.

She gave me the big shot this morning, with the big needle, right into the joint (ow); also a bottle of pain drugs.  (Yay!)  Which this post is not about, how much I love Vicodin.  Y'all know that already.

Nope, it's about this guy standing in front of me while I'm waiting to pick up the Vicodin.  His kid has a drug-resistant staph infection.  The meds to handle that cost, and I kid you not, two thousand dollars for eight pills.  His insurance covers eight hundred of it.

Luckily the guy is rich as shit, and only blinks a little before whipping out his AmX.  My kid would have had to die,  frankly.

Nor am I joking.  Last week that was mr delagar, who is borderline diabetic,  -- the doctor, the same one who gave me the big shot, after trying other things for a month, wanted to put him on a drug which is meant to coax his pancreas back into action. Biata, I think it's called? Only our insurance won't cover it, and it's $270/month, which, as broke as we are, that might as well be two thousand dollars.

So we had to do without the meds.  The doctor is currently arguing with our insurance over whether they should pay for the medication or let his pancreas die (and then they can pay for all the really expensive care that will come from him being a diabetic, which, hey, that makes plenty of sense) and meanwhile he's on meds that don't work, but are really really cheap.

Someone tell me again why socialized medicine is a bad idea.  I keep forgetting.

Whining Part III

Spent the day at various clinics, watching the kid get stuck and scanned and talking her off the ledge. She's only nine, but yikes can she panic.

We're looking at, among other things now, celiac disease. Massively life-altering but not so bad otherwise. I think I vote for that one if I can't have the Magic Unicorn. (That's the one where she's allergic to yellow peas, so we just eliminate yellow peas from her diet and....)

For the CT scan, she had to drink a barium shake. First off, she won't eat *anything* these days -- getting her to eat half a bite of banana for breakfast is like a three-act drama. So a two-pint barium shake? I look at the tech in dismay and amazement. Are you high? I wanted to inquire. I get three sips of water into her, I'm doing the happy dance, woman.

Second, apparently barium shakes do not taste very nice.

Nonetheless, by dint of much threatening and some judicious bribery (cost me three books afterwards at Books a Million) I got about a pint of it into her.

Then they stuck her so they could run her full of iodine. She actually didn't protest that part so much. This was after drawing the blood for the blood tests.


I don't even want to think about what this is doing to our medical bills.