Medicare Woes

It's the verbiage that gets me.  Coupled with the bad grammar, it's another indication of how this President has let the country devolve into stupidity and chaos.

The Medicare Part B (Medical Insurance) premium amount for 2020 wasn't available in time to include with this bill.  You're being billed the current 2019 premium rate for January 2020.  Your next bill will reflect the new rate for 2020 and any difference in the amount due for January 2020.

That was printed at the top of the insert in the billing envelope.  If there were ever a sign that the world has gone to hell in a hand-basket, that's it.  How that is possible is beyond me.  There are government employees who are supposed to be on top of this issue.  

Recognizing that, I called my Congresswoman.  The lovely young man who answered the phone thought he might be able to help me with a Medicare question, but, alas, he did not have a ready answer at the tip of his fingers.  We laughed, he put me on hold, and he went to find the Health Care person.  

A brief wait (with no Muzak!) and he returned to tell me that she was as flummoxed as we were.  She wanted to do some investigation - I wanted to know where to direct my ire - and he wondered if she might call me back later, after gathering facts.  Agreeing that facts were important and that my issue was not pressing, I left my contact information and hung up.

The bill is due on the 25th of this month.  Recognizing that the USPS might take its own sweet time in delivering the payment to St. Louis, Missouri, I went on-line to mymedicare.gov to pay it.  Signing in was easy, though the popups were annoying, and arriving at the payment page was simple, too.  Everything was going well until I scrolled to the bottom of the page where this notice awaited:

It may take 3 days to process your payment.

Three days?  Where's the float on that money during that period of time?  Why would it take 3 days for the bits and bytes to find one another and transfer the funds?  Another question I suppose Medicare will have to answer if my payment isn't processed in the next two days, before the due date and I end up protesting late fees.

And, it got worse the more I read.

Due to a processing error, a small percentage of people with Medicare who pay their Medicare premiums through Easy Pay had premiums deducted twice from their bank account. We are currently working with the Treasury Department to reverse the duplicate Medicare premium deduction and have the erroneous deduction credited back to bank accounts, as soon as possible. You can contact us at 1-800-MEDICARE (or use the Live Chat feature) with any questions you have.

Imagine living Social Security check to Social Security check, budgeting and planning so that you don't run out of money at the end of the month.  How must it feel to wait for Medicare to talk to Treasury to fix the problem?  A processing error?  Are there no checks and balances? 

These are old people we're talking about; we frighten more easily, are more vulnerable, have less resilience than we used to.  Double dipping by the government is bad in any situation.  Imagining this happening to G'ma as her mental faculties declined has given me a bellyache.

By this point, I'm really less concerned about the missing commas between January and 2020.

But wait.  There's more.  This was on the bill from TBG's last visit to his GP.

PSA SCREENING - NOT A MEDICALLY NECESSARY SERVICE

Apparently, neither AARP's Medicare Advantage plan nor Medicare itself thinks that prevention is better than treatment.  There's an Adjustment on the bill, which brings the cost down by two thirds, but there's still that pesky $20.44 to pay. 

I spoke to my insurance advisor about this; she agrees that it's ridiculous but told me that my complaints would fall on deaf ears.  Others have tried, and failed.

I'm glad he had the test. I'm glad we had the money to pay for it.  I am beyond sad that my government doesn't want to help me keep him healthy.

I did some sleuthing on the interwebs, and found this, from healthcaredive.com back in June, 2017:

HHS currently has 17 vacant positions that are important enough to require Senate confirmation, according to data from the Washington Post. .....and other rank-and-file HHS positions remain unfilled. The cause appears to be a combination of lack of experience on Trump’s transition team, a federal hiring freeze Trump has administered and his stated belief that many government positions are unnecessary.

Perhaps it was the duty of some of those unnecessary government employees to figure this stuff out.

Medicare used to be a lot easier to navigate, when I was doing it for G'ma, back when they weren't double-charging, back when they knew how much money they wanted, back when.......

As I said to the billing officer at the medical practice this morning - VOTE!