It’s 3:30 in the morning; restless, not sleeping.
I really do like the life Tracy and I have made here in Gainesville, Florida.
It’s fairly quiet in our neighborhood, I hear some traffic over on Waldo Road, there’s a radio playing somewhere off to the east, louder than it needs be, but then, I’m a bit of a curmudgeon now, so my opinion is suspect.
I do know what’s keeping me up.
Tracy turns 65 in October. Hard to believe how time moves on, carving on our faces and bodies the life we’ve lived.
She plays tennis a couple of times a week, a friendly but fierce competitor, Tracy. She wouldn’t really agree with that sentiment, but it is true and I love her for both her friendly demeanor and the steel inside.
And I wonder at our age, our future.
We paid cash for this house, where I’m sitting on the front porch that wasn’t here when we bought it. We’ve renovated much of it, some still in process, paid as we worked. And when I say we renovated it, I mean we’ve done the work. We’ve poured the concrete, framed the walls, set trusses, shingled, pulled down old cabinets and hung new. All of it.
And I really don’t want to see it all disappear, but it seems that’s the future
We’ll live here a while, and enjoy what we’ve done, do some traveling.
But I see the vultures circling.
A constant reminder of what’s really valued in our world, of what it’s all about, as my old college buddy Mike Garrett recently reminded me; money.
It’s all about money here in the US.
Individually, we love our families, our friends. We care for one another, help where we can. But collectively, what we care about it money.
It’s apparent in the constant, weekly mailings and daily phone calls Tracy receives from insurance carriers, all suddenly interested in Tracy. In the five or six agents from various companies that have knocked on our door in the last three months.
They’re not here because the care about Tracy.
They’re here because the companies they work for smell money.
Monthly installments on her impending hospitalization. Not that she’s ill or injured; it’s just the undercurrent of the sales pitch, the fear they sell.
That’s of course, not what comes out of their mouths as they spin the webs of confusion of coverage.
Coverage.
That’s a great word. Coverage.
There hasn’t been an insurance plan written in 50 years that’s about coverage.
They’re about exclusions.
They wouldn’t be 20 pages long in small print if it wasn’t about exclusions.
So what’s the point in asking what’s covered? Because, at the end, it’s not. Something is always excluded. That condition, this particular procedure, that doctor, those pills.
It’s frustrating to know that this home that we’d like to leave to our children, some kind of inheritance, or just a place to hang out in Florida, will most likely be absorbed into what is termed Health Care. There is no care in Health Care. There is only the bottom line, like Mike said, the money. Profit.
Because of deductibles, because of co-pays, because of exclusions, I know we won’t, don’t have the money necessary to pay for any kind of serious illness or accident. And I would hazard a guess that we’re like most Americans. And this home will become just another house on the market, and one of us will be in the hospital and the other, God only knows where.
Of course the agents and mailings started showing up because of Medicare.
The $134.00 per month that will be deducted monthly from Tracy’s Social Security check, as it is already being deducted from mine. Naïve of me; I didn’t know going into Medicare that it included a monthly payment once we reached 65. That’s how far out of touch I was. And I do consider myself reasonably smart, but that little fact escaped me.
Back when LBJ arm-twisted Medicare into existence, the policy wonks thought that it would deter over-use of the system if seniors had to “buy into” the system. Probably not a bad thought, but I missed it somewhere along the way.
So collectively, we pay $264.00 per month for 80% ‘coverage’ of… well, some things. It’s really hard to know what, because it’s spelled out so clearly in the manuals and brochures that we’ve received from a dozen different companies, and from Medicare itself, that vast bureaucracy matched only by the expansive health care industry focused on that one thing that matters; money.
And the insurance arm of that expansive health care industry wants that $264.00 that will be deducted right out of our Social Security benefit. Some how, they all promise to provide better ‘care’ with their policies than what Medicare can provide.
And their thick insurance plans, impressive in the convoluted, precise, legal language, intentionally as impenetrable to common understanding as the long-dead legal language it is, promises only that some things are indeed ‘covered.’
Up to some certain percentage.
Most of the time….well, some of the time… well, perhaps not in this particular case.
So I sit here on the porch, 4:32 a.m. now, still wondering. Medicare, Supplemental, Medicare Plus, private insurance…they all want our money. And we have a limited amount of that, and we have only a limited “window” in which to decide, so we need to hurry up and figure all this out.
This love of mine, my wife, Tracy, I want to do right by her, and I have no idea what that is.
I only know that as I walk the halls of North Florida Regional hospital playing music on Wednesday mornings, stopping in rooms here and there, that the patients are not there because they want to be. Emotions are high, decisions are difficult, thinking is stuck in a molasses of pain and grief. The people care deeply about one another; the system does not, but it will profit from that pain and grief.
We’ve developed a health care system in America based on money, not on care.
It just evolved over time as I worked at other things in my carpentry, in my business, in my busyness. I didn’t really pay attention to that. There are tens of thousands of good doctors and nurses caught in a system that is dedicated to one fundamental priority; money.
And it’s late in the day for Tracy and I; it’s late in the day for a lot of us.
I admire those who care for others and I grew up with a lot of respect for doctors and nurses, but I have no affection for the hulking, mercenary system we have created.