Aloha, Mr. President, I hope all is well. I want to begin this open letter with telling you that my father, a WW II veteran, 82nd Airborne/504th Parachute, Staff Sergeant Henry Chong Min Lee, died just before Christmas, after spending 21 months in a nursing home. He was 89. I want to let you know that contacting agencies such as Social Security and the Veteran's Administration, since his death, has been a lengthy back-and-forth process, still ongoing, and if I were not here to do all of the communicating with them, I doubt that my 82-year-old mother would be up to accomplishing all of this.
The whole story is below the fold:
Let me start with this. Thursday before last, 01/08/09, the day before my dad's funeral -- for which the VA will, I hope, reimburse my mom all of $300 if I can complete the paperwork-- a letter arrived informing my mom that the $123 monthly disability allowance check which my dad had just received, direct deposited to his bank account, was money that he was not "entitled" to because of his death. Before I could send them a refund check on Tuesday 01/13/09, we received the annual letter Monday 01/12/09 informing my dad that his new monthly disability allowance would be $123. I'm guessing the VA folks who wanted the $123 back, knowing my dad was dead, had information not communicated to the VA folks who were giving him the annual good news of a bump in his monthly disability allowance. But that's -- so far -- the "end" of the story. Now I want to go back to the beginning.
In 1989, Mr. President, my dad was diagnosed with the early signs of dementia, and over the course of testing, he was further believed to be in the early stages of Alzheimer's. Thanks to a switch to a very good drug for treating Alzheimer's, my dad's fairly sharp decline, in terms of mental acuity, plateaued. He was more or less stable for most of the last 13 years of his life, his short-term memory all but gone, but his long-term memory fairly intact. However, because of the diagnosis of dementia/Alzheimer's, he was denied long-term disability insurance when it was offered to my mom and to him through her State retirement organization.
When it was decided that we could no longer care for my dad at home, in March 2007, we had to put my dad into a nursing home. Thanks to HMSA, our local medical insurer through my mom's State retirement plan, and to Medicare, the full cost of the nursing home and medication -- roughly $7200 a month -- was covered.
For the first 100 days.
After that, because my dad, who showed numerous hairline factures in his spine, possibly due to the impact from his parachute jumps in WW II, could no longer do physical therapy. He was simply in too much pain to sit up and get out of bed anymore. It was horrible to hear him scream when they moved him to wash or toilet him, or to change his sheets.
Once my dad could no longer do physical therapy, Medicare cut him off after 100 days on the dot. In effect, I believe they were telling him: "You are no longer strong enough to do physical therapy, you are going to die, and we will not support you anymore." HMSA ran out as well, and so my mom paid the roughly $7200 a month out of their life savings. Until the end.
Why, you may well wonder, did we not apply for Medicaid. Well, we did. I submitted the application three times and was rejected three times because my dad, along with my mom, had too many assets. I know this is a State, not a Federal issue, so I'll be brief. The runaround, Mr. President, from the folks at Medicaid, is unbelievable. Each time I provided everything they said they needed, including things like bank statements I’d already submitted before in the same application period -- it's a lot of paperwork, I assure you – when I was finally told the application was complete, we would get a rejection letter telling us that we still had too many assets. Each time the mentioned asset(s) was a different one, one they’d not brought up before. The last time, we had to cash in my dad's VA life insurance, at less that face value, and spend that down.
Believe it or not – I barely could myself -- we had just gotten him to the point where the next payment to the nursing home, which we still had to pay, of course, would have put my dad under the $2000 asset limit and were about to apply again.
But he died. With less than $2000 in the bank in the end. Essentially, a pauper.
He still recognized us at the end, though, and I'm glad at least for that.
Sorry, Mr. President, I tried to be brief. If I spent more time on all the details -- like never getting a call returned by the Medicaid folks and having to go down to their office each time to ask for clarification on what was needed -- this could go on and on.
To sum up then, I wish there were something that could be done to make the VA and the Medicare process more humane. How do we, as a country, want to be perceived in terms of the way we treat our elderly and our veterans?
We're far from out of the woods yet with my dad. Social Security called my mom on Tuesday 01/13/09 asking why she hadn't submitted my dad's Death Certificate yet. This after they said the mortuary would notify them electronically. Because I’m handling all of this paperwork, and my mom had no idea about the process, Social Security called me at work to tell me that I had to submit an original copy. I had in my hand the last letter from them telling me I could fax it to them if the mortuary couldn’t get it to them fast enough.
So is it an electronic notification, or a fax, or an original copy? I mean . . . well, I think you know what I mean.
Mahalo, Mr. President, for your time. Despite all of this confusion that is my current situation, I'm looking forward to eight years of positive change in this country. I contributed what I could last time, and I will do so again.
Aloha and peace be with you.