3 posts tagged “insurance”
In the very near future, I'm going to have to change my automobile insurance provider, for reasons best not discussed here. (You know who you are.) So today, I've spent some time calling various insurance companies to get quotes. Here is part of the actual conversation I had with the American Family insurance agent:
Agent: Okay, then, you mostly use this vehicle for driving to work?
Me: I don't drive to work.
Agent: And how many miles a week do you drive to work?
Me: I don't drive to work.
Agent: So you are unemployed at this time. And your husband works where?
Me: I work at the University. I JUST DON'T DRIVE TO WORK.
Agent: (stunned silence)
Me: Not driving to work is not the same thing as not having a job.
Agent: Now you'll want rental coverage on this policy?
Me: No. Don't need it.
Agent: But if this vehicle were in the repair shop, you'd need a rental car to get to work.
Me: I still don't drive to work and you can't make me, even with your weird cultural pressure to conform.
Agent: (stunned silence)
It is a beautiful day. Sunny, high clear skies, about 65 degrees. I even have the day off, but only because today has been set aside for a series of medical torments.
First to the lab for some blood work in an effort to sort out exactly what kind of reindeer games my thyroid is playing. Five attempts and three technicians in, they'd only managed to wrest a dozen drops of blood into a little vial. This is sick, but I finally had to say, "Just get me a butterfly needle and let me do it. I know where the one vein that works is." So my insurance is paying the doctor's phlebotomist I-don't-know-how-much* to watch me stick myself.
Then on to the optometrist to have my eyes poked, prodded, dilated, and blinded with a little flash light. No changes there. I'm still mostly blind, but my strained left retina is no worse than last year.
I've got a brief respite at the moment and plan to spend it on the screen porch with the cats, but then it's on to The World's Smallest Dentist, where I'll have two more of my old dilapidated amalgam fillings replaced. Joy.
*As for not knowing how much any of this will cost me, I have to say, it's really nice to have good insurance. I won't pay much for any of these little torments, and I didn't pay anything today. At some future point I'll get a polite bill in the mail telling me what amount my insurance didn't cover. If you have insurance and have forgotten what it's like to go without, let me assure you, it's about a million times better to have this experience.
Do you know what $100 worth of eye drops looks like?
Like that.
This year, I've decided to have allergies in my eyes, and have been prescribed this bottle of magic fluid to alleviate my symptoms. Luckily, I have fairly decent insurance through Jesus, Inc. Still, when I picked up my prescription and they told me the cost of my co-pay was $40, I coughed. Then I looked at the little slip that shows how much I saved with my insurance: $59.99. That teeny-tiny little bottle is $99.99, unless you're fortunate enough to have insurance.
There have been times when I couldn't have afforded the $40 co-pay, let alone a $100 bottle of eye drops. Honestly, I could barely afford it now. The whole experience refreshed my fury at the government's refusal to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies for lower prices. You know why drugs are cheaper in Canada? Because the Canadian government's single payer health care system negotiates lower prices. Why can't our government do the same?
Somewhere out there, someone is thinking of typing a little comment that says, "Yeah, but with nationalized health care, you have to wait for health care." I won't deny that, but what I will deny is that there is anything inherently wrong with having to wait for treatment of non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries. When the alternative is just not getting any health care--which is the case for a lot of Americans--waiting doesn't seem so bad.
Look, I've gone without treatment for a variety of health problems, because I couldn't afford the doctor's visit, let alone what might be prescribed for my ailment. Worse than that, I personally have known two people who died because they couldn't afford early health care intervention for an illness. Wait until someone you know dies because they couldn't get health care, and then tell me that nationalized health care is a bad thing. (Get back to me on that one. I'll wait here.)
Today, after buying my $100 bottle of eye drops, I'm also angry at people like Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Besides having a stupid name, he has said this of his state's plan to introduce a state-wide mandatory insurance program: "We insist that everybody who drives a car has insurance. And cars are a lot less expensive than people."
No wonder so few people in this country have any clue just how poor poor people are. Here's a little hint, Mitty: Not everyone can even afford to own a car. How has our culture reached a state where we equate car ownership with essential existence? Nobody gets a choice about being alive. You don't get to go down to a dealership and pick our your pancreas or your colon or your thyroid or your hip joints or any of the thousand other body parts that may betray you in old age, or in the very near future. The state won't even sanction your suicide--they force you to go on living in the body you have. If you didn't choose to be born, and you're not allowed to choose your own death, doesn't that give you an essential right to have access to life-sustaining health care? We don't believe in letting people starve to death in our great nation, but we think nothing of letting them die slow, degrading deaths, driven to bankruptcy by illness, and then at last deprived of all but minimal palliative care as they wait for death.
Lately, I've been seeing an automotive commercial which asks, "When does a car stop being just metal and glass, and become a part of your family?" Besides being the stupidest notion I've ever heard, it also makes me wonder how often insurance companies declare people to be "totalled."
