My heart is pounding like I just ran down the street. My palms are sweaty and my head is pulsing with the edges of a headache, pressure pushing at my temples and behind my eyes.
It’s amazing that my stress responses for being held up at gun point, being in a car accident and being yelled at in public are all remarkably similar to facing down the portal of marylandhealthconnection.org.
Now, I imagine most of my friends and family have never done battle with this website. Most people get health insurance from their employer. I’m part of that 7% that bought my own for years (since I graduated from college, I’ve never had employer-provided health insurance, but I’ve also never been withOUT health insurance) right up to 2016 where the rising costs of health insurance forced me out of the system JUST as the rising embrace of the ACA caught up to me and provided coverage through “Obamacare” – after Kristen and I got married the numbers got hairier and throug a comedy of errors that were NOT comedic at the time, we slipped through the cracks only to be caught by Medicaid.
I feel ashamed by it. I feel relieved by it. I feel stressed by it. It’s a (generally) great level of coverage as long as I don’t need coverage. I like my primary care physician and his office is part of a larger facility that means I don’t have to go too far afield for additional testing. I like all the acronyms. I hate not knowing exact numbers of exact types of coverage but they’re pretty clear about what they will and will not cover: I’ve had a weird cough off and on for many, many years that my previous doctor didn’t believe in and my current doctor’s not worried about – but more to the point – unless he IS worried enough about it he’s also made it clear that I can’t afford to find out specifically what’s going on… so I try not to worry about it any more than my doctor does.
None of the above is the source of today’s stress. Today’s the day we renewed our coverage. There’s always a little tense moment where the black box of the health exchange churns and spins and determines whether or not you’re still eligible and we’re low-enough on the financial spectrum that I’m not REALLY afraid of being cut off from Medicaid, but … there’s a lot of “approximately” “roughly” when you try to plan your Life around this determination and… well…
“Income requirements: Single adults have an income cap of $1,468 per month and single parents who have children are capped at $2,245. Families of four have an income limit of $4,608 per month and pregnant women are limited to $3,794.”
We’ve had no END of trouble with eligibility being a married couple, filing as a married couple, Living together as a married couple, but NOT having children. That’s somehow not something that’s REALLY foreseen by The System. To the point that the “Navigator” we went to after Kristen and I got married actually royally fucked up our health insurance coverage (it was his incompetence that actually got us kicked off our previously purchased health care plans, but then in a happy accident this led us to discover we were eligible for Medicaid). In addition, we’ve done okay through COVID (mostly thanks to YOU dear readers / listeners) but also because of a couple of artist grants – which has put us RIGHT up to the threshold of eligibility. Terrifyingly close. If Maryland fiddles with the formula by a percentage point…
I mean, they keep fiddling with everything else! Every couple of months our passwords don’t work with our coverage portals because our healthcare’s been purchased by someone, or the facility’s changed their website security, and we have to go through a harrowing process of figuring out why and how things have changed. Annually they kick you out of the web portal and you’ve got to recreate your account. Annually of course you have to re-enroll and every year the system’s a little different, sometimes adding fields (causing errors for repeat customers) or subtracting fields… this year it’s the optimization for iPads that seems to cause the trouble – big friendly buttons that push the headers for information you’re trying to enter off the screen as you’re trying to enter it. They’ve also created a new drop down for “single – divorced – separated – married living together – married living separately – widowed” etc – where our status (married living together) is a) kinda buried in the middle and b) not the default, so though we have been happily attached as one another’s “husband / wife” for several years now, we were getting an error because the default status of this newly installed field was “single”.
And God forbid you screw up and have to go back. Holy crap.
In any case, I got Kristen re-enrolled and Monday I’ll get to go through my annual “I exist” phone calls. I have no idea why, but I seem to have a continuing problem with convincing health care systems that I’m IN their system. I think it MAY stem from misspellings of my name (I see that there are several instances of me being a “hinkle” floating around, but they also hit Kristen with numerous “kristin”s and that never seems to knock HER out of the system.
Sigh.
It’s terrifying being in health care limbo and I hate it.
It’s also interesting how this is one of the rare things that NEVER gets talked about on social media. I think there’s definite shame that goes along with Medicaid. It’s the realization that YOU’RE one of the people they talk about when they say the government’s supporting you… and it’s true.
Now, in all fairness I pay plenty of taxes in one form or another, and I paid into the system for over 15 years and have literally NEVER drawn on it outside of regular (well, irregular) doctor visits. I just paid my thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to Bluecross / Blueshield over the years and got nothing for my trouble other than the above biannualish marathon phone sessions trying to prove that I exist. (this problem has been excitingly variable… one year it was trying to get BCBS to SIMPLY TAKE MY MONEY… for some reason the automatic payments from my credit union to my health insurance policy were suddenly returned for months at a time… seriously, I bring gremlins to the healthcare industry).
Sigh twice.
Well, who do you blame when the world goes to Hell? It sure seems like everything’s scrambling to keep up. Surprise! Create a web exchange of health care services! Surprise! We’re going to expand coverage so that millions more people can use it! Surprise! We’re going to change all the little fiddly bits annually and btw people need to be able to read it in multiple languages on multiple web-enabled devices on a secure system and btw can you do it by next Tuesday? The Marylandhealthexhange.gov and Medicaid sites as a whole all broadcast (webcast) the hallmarks of being done too fast on a budget.
But it’s sure better than nothing. And the system I paid thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for didn’t work much better.
Sigh thrice. I’ll call them on Monday. Maybe they’ll believe I’m real.