Win Lose Draw

This is what the Mississippi River looked like in my neighborhood today as it experienced its scheduled drawdown. I think I read somewhere that it's so the infrastructure of the locks and dams can be inspected. Meanwhile there were flocks of gulls and human onlookers. Many people seemed to be treasure hunting.

 

I watched a crew of workers pull bikes and scooters out of the muck with ropes and hooks.

There was an immense tangle of stuff, including the metal box below. The workers tried for a few minutes to open it--to no avail. The whole situation seemed bleak to me despite the volunteers from the park service talking with visitors about the river and its original configuration before the sawmills, and the flour mills, and the shoring up of the ruined falls. All the while, the evidence of current stupidity and ruination is poking up from the mud. Hundreds of plastic water bottles, trash of every imaginable kind, including the Nice Ride rental bikes and the rental scooters that are a plague for pedestrians on city sidewalks. The pile above represents only five minutes or so of work. I suppose this went on for hours. We're a disaster, we humans. 

I hope someone found treasure. Gold, or silver, or a box of something precious. 

When I got home I opened the bill from my kidney procedure. 20,800 and some dollars--not including the doctor's visits and the testing beforehand. Because I have a Medicare Advantage plan that I pay 99 dollars a month for, all but 250.00 dollars of that was covered. I'll bet our president's care for his Covid hospitalization totaled a quarter of a million. It's disgusting that so many people do not have decent health care or insurance of any kind--especially during a pandemic. These United States are so far into the muck, I fear we may never get out. 

BUT I have cast my ballot. And I do hope for change.

What did you do today?

I took care--or tried to anyhow of some stuff for my mom. Medicare, prescription drug coverage, catastrophic insurance. The letter she got from CareFirst about how her drug coverage might be changing was just a form letter, and didn't really apply to her. Thanks, CareFirst.

I emailed my doctor about some stuff for myself. God, I LOVE how Kaiser has email and lets you view every record of every little thing electronically and how you don't have to call them on the phone.

But I did call Kaiser today--I called a couple of different Kaiser offices about my exploding premium (it doubled--okay, I exaggerate it only went up 96.6%) and to see if they could advise me on a different policy. The thing is that the two policies I'm considering are vastly different. Example: An ER visit  has a 30% co-pay under one plan and a $300 co-pay under another. Trouble is no one can tell me the basic charge for an ER visit is (or an x-ray, or a CT scan or anything else) so I can't compare a dollar amount to a percentage. Yeah, I know. First world problems. One of the people I talked to said they might have some sample rates for various procedures available sometime next year.

So, dear readers, should I spend $610 more per year on top of the $6,504 per year I will already be spending in premiums? If I do, my co-pay will go down from the 40% on my current plan to a mere 30%. Is it worth it?

But rejoice. I will not think of any of this tonight. I've decided to finally join the party and watch Breaking Bad. I'm on Season 1 Episode 7. It's waaaaay too gory for me, but I have to admit it's engrossing. I watch it on my iPad so I can use my hand to cover up the bloody stuff. But I'm fascinated by those do-every-possible-fucking-wrong-thing-out-of-desperation dramas. And let's just say that right now, I need some engrossing real bad.

I'm wondering what it would take to make me cook meth. Of course since the only element on the periodic table that I remember is H20 (you probably think I'm kidding, but I'm not--and I just Googled that and found out that water isn't on the Periodic Table. Hahaha. So there--I'm an idiot.) And I would rather do just about anything other than a sales job, so I'm probably pretty safe. Meth cooker/drug dealer will probably not appear on my resume.

But just for the record--I have, in the past, been driven to some pretty serious desperation.

City of Baltimore: Round Three

The invoices for my mom's health insurance premiums finally arrived today. They were forwarded by my cousin, whose basement apartment my mom moved from three years ago. I cannot  say for certain that she changed her address from there to my brother's house when she moved in with him, but I would bet a sheet of postage stamps that she made a reasonable attempt.

At it turns out the City of Baltimore has a near deity-like omnipresence. The envelope that the invoices were packaged in bear one return address. The top of each monthly invoice bears a second address, while the bottom of the invoice that one is instructed to return with the payment has yet a third address. I wrote change of address letters and mailed one to each of the three different addresses.

My project of setting up these monthly payments for auto-pay must be abandoned. Auto pay does not seem to be an option as there are no instuctions for such on the invoice. And, Baltimore knows, it is not possible to speak to anyone by phone that can instruct me. Ah, well. Should I somehow manage to get a parking ticket in Baltimore, it looks like I can pay it online.

Of further note, my panic about missing the payment deadline of January first has been assuaged. The  postmark on the city's envelope is January 10th. I've heard of "Tulsa Time," but maybe someone should write a song about Baltimore.

City of Baltimore/ Round Two

Oh, I could give you the blow by blow. Who I called. What they said. How long it took. How much of the time I spent on hold. How the last number I tried led back to the first number I called.

But I won't.

What matters is that I have not yet succeeded in paying my mom's insurance premium for January. Or enrolling her in auto pay so the specter of future missed payments no longer haunts me.

There are no more numbers left to call.

Dear Senior Citizens, How do you manage alone?

"I wonder if I'm ever going to get my bill for my health insurance," my mom says to me while I linger in the kitchen avoiding the dastardly coughing woman in my yoga class. Last night the wind rattled my windows, rattled my house, rattled my bones, and my very soul. Without any sleep this could be the morning Coughing Woman breaches my immune system---so I have a second cup of coffee. Oops, too late to go to yoga now.

"What was that you said about a bill, Mom?" My exhausted brain hears the alarm bell, albeit ever so faintly. Out from her bedroom she shuffles with an invoice from December, explaining that the December 1st payment was the last one she'd made. My mother has Medicare, but she also has supplementary insurance through the City of Baltimore where she worked for several years as a janitor in city office buildings. With all of her health issues, she needs that secondary insurance. The upper right hand corner of the last month's invoice carries a terrifying advisory, "If payment is not received by the due date, coverage will be terminated." Last week's trip to the emergency room rose up like an anvil ready to drop. "Uh-oh," I say. My mom went on to explain that the City of Baltimore sends a packet of a year's worth of invoices every January--but they always send them late. The payment is due on the first of the month, but the invoices never arrive in time.

I decide to call the employee benefits phone number listed on the invoice. It's 9:00 a.m. in California. There is no answer in Baltimore. Maybe I mis-dialed. I try again. Lunch? I try an hour later. Still no answer. No outgoing push one for this, two for that message either. Is it a holiday in Baltimore? A week long festival for the inauguration? Martin Luther King Jr. Week? I try the main number for the City of Baltimore. The menu of selections doesn't apply to what I need, but I select for speaking to a real live person and remain on hold for, I dunno, ten minutes? Meanwhile, my mom and I discuss auto-pay options--putting her monthly health insurance premiums on a credit card and enduring the service charge, auto-deducting  the payment from a checking account; why we should do this, i.e. what if you're sick mom, and in the hospital, and I forget to pay it for you? Still, I'm on hold, so I hang up. I grab the iPad and go to the City of Baltimore website expecting to see some banner across it: "City Closed on Mondays," or "Monday is Furlough Day." No. So I scroll through each link to see if we can accomplish setting up the auto-pay online. No. I try the first number again. Ah! "Push one for employee benefits." The person I speak to ensures me that they have the correct address for my mom, that yes, they send out the invoices late every year, that no her coverage isn't lapsed. "I'd like to enroll her in auto-pay," I say. She tells me that the person I need to talk to is on another call. She'll call me back.

It's noon now in California. 3:00 in Baltimore. While waiting, I've checked on my Mom's catastrophic coverage from Care First--which is, essentially, Blue Cross and Blue Sheild, too. My mom thought she'd changed her address with Care First by enclosing notification of her new address with her payment some months before her move here in August. When we finally received the forwarded invoice from them for the next payment, her coverage had lapsed. It took a bit of ranting, but I got it re-instated. It turned out that if you want to change your address with Care First, you need to call them, wait on hold for awhile, and then have them tell you the address of the mail room administrator in Lexington, Kentucky. This address appears nowhere on their invoice. There are no instructions of any kind on the invoice for changing your address. They will, however, drop you like a hot potato if your invoice goes to the wrong address causing you to pay late. But this morning, no worries there. She is paid up currently (after the near disaster of the lapse.) I requested a letter of confirmation. Which I had already requested in writing back in August when I wrote them a letter then after the reinstatement.

I assume that if we had national health insurance in a single-payer model, it would work much like Medicare. Here I am. A person. A citizen. I have this coverage. There would be no dancing around with invoices sent late. No slipping through the cracks. "Ooohhh, this country will never have health care like that!" my mom says.

Oh, dear old people,  especially you who are hard of hearing or with failing eyesight, you who are not computer literate, you whose blood pressure spikes a bit as you struggle to decipher "press 1 for this, 2 for that, etc," how do you manage? From the bottom of my heart, I hope someone is helping you.

It's Turdsday. Shit I've Learned about Divorce #4: Money, Taxes, Joint Accounts, Credit Cards and Other Horrors

Taxes:
When my marriage broke up, I had all the financial trappings of a big fat life: a CPA who prepared my taxes,a financial advisor, a team of divorce lawyers. Imagine my surprise when the end of 2008 rolled around and I filed my first individual tax return in thirty years. Not one of those professionals had any inkling of how naive I was. I had no idea of how naive I was--cuz that's what naive is. You don't know what you don't know.


You were supposed to being paying quarterly taxes all year, the CPA said.
Yes, alimony is taxable at the full rate, the divorce attorneys said.
You need to come up with how much money?!?! the financial planner said.
I don't have any control over the tax code, someone else said.
Holy shit, I said.


Paying my income tax and the penalties I accrued from failing to pay estimated quarterly tax wiped out every cent I had saved from my rather fat alimony that first year on my own.


I've recovered from the tax debacle of 2008. But I managed to get myself into the penalty box again in 2009 when I goofed up my quarterly payments to the State of California. Here on the left coast of the country, a quarterly payment is not really a quarter. You pay nothing in the third quarter. That's because you were supposed to pay 40% in the second quarter. And, just by the way, the first and fourth quarter, you pay 30%. Um. For all I know it's that way in every state in the union. But I didn't know what I needed to know when I should have known it.


Joint Accounts:
I didn't know what to do with the joint checking accounts. After my alimony began, I quit using them. But it seemed weird to take my name off them. Someone else's name was still on them, and the accounts were being used by him. Maybe there was some strategic smart attorney something I didn't know, and I should leave things alone.Hmmm, the banker said. He could overdraw this account and you could be liable. That didn't happen. Thank god. But it could have.


Credit Cards:
When you get a credit card with someone, you might be just a simple little authorized user. It's a pain, because if you call the credit card company for any reason, you're just a big fat nothing. I'm sorry, they'll tell you. We have to speak to the owner of the account. But I'm his wife, you'll say. Who? Oh, that doesn't matter, they'll say. But if you get divorced, there's still a lot of fancy dancing to get yourself off the account. And what goes on with that account can affect your credit rating.


If you're not just an authorized user,you're probably a co-owner of the account. You can't get your name taken off. Period. We don't recognize divorce, the credit card company will say. They'll go on to say that the agreement you entered into with the credit card company supersedes divorce. You are liable even if you shredded the card long ago. Now you have to pay your divorce lawyers to help you settle this one.


Other Horrors:
Health insurance is at the top of my list of "other horrors." I won't even go into it. But think about your situation. Your health and how you insure it, and how all of that will change when you are divorced.


I wish you the best of luck.
Just telling you some shit you might want to know.




My divorce advice disclaimer: I am not an attorney, a paralegal, or a legal secretary. Nor do I possess any legal education or credentials of any kind other than having been married to an attorney for three decades and immediately thereafter involved in divorcing him for the next four years. My advice is based solely on my own experience and falls under the broader life heading of Damn It,  If Only I'd Known Then What I Know Now.

Looking Behind Me

I whittled away the day at Baltimore Washington Medical Center where my brother had a total hip replacement on Wednesday. Today my mother joined him there as an outpatient for a pulmonary function test. I spent a couple hours shuttling between the two of them, remembering two years ago when I wore a path down the hallways while my mother was a patient there after a lung re-section that excised a cancerous tumor. BWMC was my mother's second hospital that July. By the time she was admitted she could barely swallow; she had trouble keeping food down and was in constant pain.

Today I recognized the hallway where I once stood at the window looking out across the parking lot at the trees while I talked on the phone with some cubicle-ite at Aetna Insurance. I was begging for confirmation that my new insurance policy would be activated before I was dropped from my ex-husband's policy. I had already had my chiropractor and dermatologist provide the minutiae Aetna had requested. "You already know everything about me," I explained. "I've been covered by Aetna for the last twenty years.  All I'm trying to do is change from my husband's Aetna policy to my own Aetna policy." The new policy department could not access the records department, they told me. The conversation didn't end successfully , but before I made it to the elevator to go back up to my mom, my phone rang again. It was my friend Suzanne.

I sobbed into the phone. "Go back to your mom," she said. Then she told me she'd call my ex- husband and ask him to keep me on his insurance policy for a few more weeks--which she did, and he agreed.

Now two summers later, I'm amazed and grateful that I still have my mother--and as I think back on the four years since my marriage ended, I'm so thankful for all the things that my friends have done to help me.