Ineptitude or indifference, the why really doesn’t matter. What does matter is precious few people I run into during the course of life are doing a good job.
Allow me to give you a slice of my experience from today to illustrate the point.
For starters, consider the ongoing ordeal of dealing with the state’s Medicaid estate recovery people regarding my late mother. She died April 3, 2022. I may just have gotten this thing resolved on Feb. 6, 2023.
Maybe.
To understand this, know that long-term care as consumed most often by older people, is expensive and insurance pays a small part, if any. When costs easily surpass $11,000 a month, many people quickly exhaust their life savings and are shunted onto Medicaid.
In order to preserve the cash value of a life insurance policy for a burial, it must be signed over to a funeral home. To protect a house, there is a homestead exemption, that ends with the death of the owner.
My mother was a woman of modest means at best. She died with thousands of dollars in her checking account only due to the government stimulus payments.
Medicaid, rightly, wants paid as much as possible from a deceased’s assets if they’d been put on Medicaid as a last resort. We were prepared to write a check to Medicaid for our mother’s checking account assets, minus such costs as having her tombstone engraved and paying some lingering utility bills for her house.
By the way, my mother’s house is uninhabitable, having had the water and sewer disconnected physically in order to end the money drain due to the ongoing war on homeowners being practiced here under the guise of sewer improvements. Also there is structural damage to the foundation, most likely due to mine subsidence.
Medicaid wanted my brother and I to sell the house and send them the money. We offered simply to sign over the deed to them.
They didn’t want it.
I took the lead in dealing with Medicaid, from reporting my mother’s death in timely fashion, to providing them time and again details of her financial situation at her time of death.
When the Medicaid people got a bit aggressive, I reached out to a long-time acquaintance who specializes in elder law and even works at times for Medicaid. He basically advised me to tell them to stuff it regarding the house.
If we opened an estate regarding our mother, he pointed out and I already knew, it would have been upside down financially from the get-go.
Nearly a month ago I reached out – again – to Medicaid for a status update. I was required to email the same accounting of the situation I had sent so many previous times, most recently a sheaf of various documents.
I was told we were almost over the finish line. Tiring of the wait for the checkered flag, over the weekend I sent the guy I was speaking with – and his boss – an email reminder that nothing had happened in almost a month.
I got a call today that I missed, and a pathetic voice mail was left indicating the guy had been planning on sending a letter, but he guessed it never got done. He promised an email with the final accounting, and miracles, I got it today.
All that is left is for me to write the check for $3,300 or so and we’re done. I think.
Feeling emboldened by this modest success, I decided to push my luck regarding an ongoing medical matter. It was decided at a Jan. 20 regular checkup that I should have a stress test and it would be scheduled for me by that doctor’s office.
Two weeks later, considering how on this last visit the office couldn’t even find my blood work report that ostensibly had been sent to them from a lab, I thought maybe yet another matter had slipped through the cracks. I called and was told I’d have to talk to someone else, and not before the end of that week.
I waited even longer, until the beginning of this week, and called again. After working my way through three people, who all needed my date of birth, address, phone number or combinations thereof, I got to the person who handles scheduling.
She’s operating without even basic insurance knowledge, thinking my Medicare Supplement Plan G was just some add on to cover dental and vision. I pointed out it’s the best Medigap plan offered here since Plan F has been sunsetted.
This woman got a little nervous when I emphasized to her this revelation was coming from a guy who used to hold a state license in health insurance.
After some verbal tap-dancing, she assured me the request had been resubmitted with the proper note that I didn’t need a preapproval to have the work done. Because I’m that guy, I asked for the number of the central scheduling people so I could pursue this myself.
I called that number and that next woman also did some verbal tap-dancing before telling me that, magically, the approval had just come in and they would call me to schedule.
In fact, she added, she could schedule it right then. I took her up on that offer.
But in this case, or that of my deceased mother, why does it have to be so difficult? Why can’t people deliver on their promises?
Why can they not simply be required to do their job at some degree of proficiency, or hit the pavement?
Sam Ross Jr's site 