Monday, January 5, 2015

Monday Musings

With this new year comes a new health insurance plan and new doctors.  After trying Kaiser for a year, I'm going back to my group that has served me well for all of my adult life.  Kaiser's rates were half what I was paying, so I thought I'd try it.  For me, it was a most unwieldy system which didn't make it easy to access care and or prescriptions.  It took them almost a year to get my ID card corrected.  I felt stymied every time I needed to access care.

The adage "you get what you pay for" is true in this case.  Perhaps for a casual and infrequent user, this system may work.  But for someone who needs care for a chronic condition, it was a pain in the arse.  (That's another chronic condition, but I digress.)

I am also interfacing with the US Passport apparatus, and let me tell  you, that is another PIA.  What with a name change, and required legal documentation of name change, and impending deadlines for upcoming travel, I am about to pull my hair out.  (Though if I did that I would no longer look like my passport photo, and that could be a whole other wrinkle.)

I am coming to the conclusion I need a secretary, an assistant, a helper.  Someone to keep my affairs in order.  Someone to remind me that I have deadlines to be met, bills to pay, taxes to file.  As a retired person, I have lost all those administrative skills I once possessed.  Now the daily requirements are simply vexing.  Various bureaucracies I must interact with make my head explode.  The idea of retreating to a yurt in the woods (or my backyard) is becoming more and more attractive.


This is what heaven looks like to me.  

6 comments:

  1. The yurt looks like a wonderful place. I could live in a place like that if it were in a big meadow with lots of sunshine and the forest a bit more in the distance. Bureaucracies can be vexing. I'm sure it will all work out.

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  2. I hear ya. I am so there myself. Good news is that I don't remember from one week to the next.

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  3. Oh, dear Lord. Don't get me started.

    I'll take a yurt, too. And a PA. And a sherpa.

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  4. May the yurt be with you.

    I'm really sorry that Kaiser didn't work for you. Wonder if it is the particular facility? I did not want to switch to Kaiser, no I did not -- but it's worked well for me and my family. I really like being able to get tests and new Rx's and specialist exams all in the same building, and reasonably fast. They've managed my son's asthma, and his accidents. I order refills online; email my doctor when things come up. Sounds like your experience was really frustrating, though.

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  5. what more can I do to help....? (by the time you read this I will have asked you in person, and I may even have helped you with something...I hope.)

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  6. Bureaucracy can indeed drive a person to distraction and worse when there is a deadline. We got back up here to find my supplemental health coverage (to Medicare) had been canceled because a registered letter had been returned to sender instead of forwarded as we had told the post office to do. A lot of time on the phone straightened that out-- hubby did that for me and I gave verbal approval to them for him to always be able to do that for me. We talked to the post office about the goof and they said it had been a substitute who goofed up a lot of people. Wouldn't you think though that for something as important as insurance, the company (in this case United) would try harder to contact the person. They said they assumed I had died or divorced... The joys of our current world

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