TMI All Over the Place
Jan. 4th, 2011 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogAnd this was starting out, all in all, as a pretty good year:P
I had a had-to-laugh moment early in the day, when I was put on hold at another lawyer's office. With soothing elevator music playing in the background, I got to hear the sales job for the firm's huuuuge tracts of experience:
Mr. [So-and-So] and his experienced staff have been satisfying his clients for more than 20 years.
I about busted a gut when I heard THAT the wrong way, even embellishing it in my own head to say, and satisfying each other when there are no clients around, when naturally the secretary came on the line. I just about had to swallow my cheeks to keep the belly laughs on the inside.
Stop Number Two on the TMI Express was my annual checkup. All is well, I got some scrips renewed, but I was reminded of my advancing age and of the need to, you got it, go have some up-close-and-personal photography done. I'll spare you further detail.
Then to the library, to get my Sherlock book refund and pick up my Emperor of All Maladies book, which I somehow managed to get home in one piece without losing. (Oddly enough, the frontispiece of the book contains a quote from Holmes in A Study in Scarlet.) After THAT, I dropped off the prescriptions, came back an hour later, and,....
all kinds of fresh hell broke out.
----
According to the pharmacy, our coverage ended on December 31st. This, despite my having gone down to a payment specialist at Blue Cross at the end of last week-slash-month-slash-year and paid my bill IN PERSON, to ensure there would still be coverage. Apparently, not even taking my money was enough to stop them from sending us forth on the Good Ship Uninsured.
Weggies gave me a three-day, ten-buck tideover of one of them (they didn't have enough of the pills for a full supply anyway), and the other was one of Wegmans' $4 generics where insurance isn't even an issue, but I was one Hoppity Mad Bunny by the time I got home and placed the call to the company whose symbols are associated with crucifixion and riot control. (If you click on the article that the first of those images comes from, you'll read that the first Blue Cross organ-eye-zation was formed in North Carolina during the Depression, and that its motto was Nisi Dominus Frustra. Clearly, the "frustra" part hasn't changed.)
As always, I got a perfectly nice, and prompt, representative on the phone. Who, once I called (and called them on it), was perfectly happy to tell me that, while we were still COBRA-eligible, we were no longer COBRA-subsidy-eligible, and that our premium had just almost tripled.
Nice of them to mention that prior to today, huh.
Fortunately, I'd been keeping a cushion for this in our budget for whenever this happened. I just blew said cushion on dinners and birthday pressies and whatnots over the past several weeks. They will put us back in their fold, probably tomorrow, and the bill won't come due for 30 days, and then I'll get February to, hopefully, get back ahead of the payment curve again until we can find a better plan on a long-term basis. We also know now just how long we've got before COBRA dies- a year from now- so that will be the absolute outside edge of our tolerance for this crap.
So when all you Teabaggers go to work tomorrow, trying to repeal health care, to put us back in the Best Health Insurance System In The World? I hope y'all die in a fire- because your life insurance has got to be better than the way Blue Cross and its fellow Mafia members treat us:P
I had a had-to-laugh moment early in the day, when I was put on hold at another lawyer's office. With soothing elevator music playing in the background, I got to hear the sales job for the firm's huuuuge tracts of experience:
Mr. [So-and-So] and his experienced staff have been satisfying his clients for more than 20 years.
I about busted a gut when I heard THAT the wrong way, even embellishing it in my own head to say, and satisfying each other when there are no clients around, when naturally the secretary came on the line. I just about had to swallow my cheeks to keep the belly laughs on the inside.
Stop Number Two on the TMI Express was my annual checkup. All is well, I got some scrips renewed, but I was reminded of my advancing age and of the need to, you got it, go have some up-close-and-personal photography done. I'll spare you further detail.
Then to the library, to get my Sherlock book refund and pick up my Emperor of All Maladies book, which I somehow managed to get home in one piece without losing. (Oddly enough, the frontispiece of the book contains a quote from Holmes in A Study in Scarlet.) After THAT, I dropped off the prescriptions, came back an hour later, and,....
all kinds of fresh hell broke out.
----
According to the pharmacy, our coverage ended on December 31st. This, despite my having gone down to a payment specialist at Blue Cross at the end of last week-slash-month-slash-year and paid my bill IN PERSON, to ensure there would still be coverage. Apparently, not even taking my money was enough to stop them from sending us forth on the Good Ship Uninsured.
Weggies gave me a three-day, ten-buck tideover of one of them (they didn't have enough of the pills for a full supply anyway), and the other was one of Wegmans' $4 generics where insurance isn't even an issue, but I was one Hoppity Mad Bunny by the time I got home and placed the call to the company whose symbols are associated with crucifixion and riot control. (If you click on the article that the first of those images comes from, you'll read that the first Blue Cross organ-eye-zation was formed in North Carolina during the Depression, and that its motto was Nisi Dominus Frustra. Clearly, the "frustra" part hasn't changed.)
As always, I got a perfectly nice, and prompt, representative on the phone. Who, once I called (and called them on it), was perfectly happy to tell me that, while we were still COBRA-eligible, we were no longer COBRA-subsidy-eligible, and that our premium had just almost tripled.
Nice of them to mention that prior to today, huh.
Fortunately, I'd been keeping a cushion for this in our budget for whenever this happened. I just blew said cushion on dinners and birthday pressies and whatnots over the past several weeks. They will put us back in their fold, probably tomorrow, and the bill won't come due for 30 days, and then I'll get February to, hopefully, get back ahead of the payment curve again until we can find a better plan on a long-term basis. We also know now just how long we've got before COBRA dies- a year from now- so that will be the absolute outside edge of our tolerance for this crap.
So when all you Teabaggers go to work tomorrow, trying to repeal health care, to put us back in the Best Health Insurance System In The World? I hope y'all die in a fire- because your life insurance has got to be better than the way Blue Cross and its fellow Mafia members treat us:P
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 10:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 11:48 pm (UTC)That's abominable.
And here my parents wonder why I'm all in favour of the government being involved in health care. They would be hard-pressed to fuck it up more than private industry has thus far, and that's saying something.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 02:14 am (UTC)When I started my own shop in 2006, we declined COBRA from my old firm for medical insurance (since Eleanor had partially subsidized coverage then, which we switched to), but we tried to keep it for dental. A different Blue Cross entity handled THAT bit of meshugenah. Just like this time, we went weeks without knowing whether, and as of when, we were covered. We got caught in a trap where one form said we had one deadline to elect coverage but another said we needed to do it within the Congressionally mandated one. They tried to get rid of us through that kerfuffle, but finally agreed to retain us (heh, little orthodontist humor there;), but never sent any billing to confirm what time period they'd applied our premium payment to. In the end, it turned out to be a period in which we never used the coverage, and by the time we realized that and sent in an unbilled premium, they rejected it because we were too late.
Sigh. Reminds me of the old story about the legend of the snake who convinced a Cherokee to carry him up a mountain, promising not to poison him, and then poisoned him when they reached the top:
The rattlesnake looked up at him and grinned, "You knew what I was when you picked me up."
no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 02:58 am (UTC)But same principle. :(
no subject
Date: 2011-01-05 10:37 am (UTC)