I just finished reading - devouring, actually - the novel STiLL ALiCE by Lisa Genova. It is the story, told from Alice's point of view, of her descent into Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease.
I don't remember being this affected by a book in a very long time. I fear few things as much as I fear losing myself. This particular disease is a very scary bogeyman in my closet. Thankfully, no one in my family has it, so I am spared the genetic haunts.
SPOILER ALERT
But here's the thing that has me in its grip right now. In the story, before she is too far gone, Alice sets up an "out" for herself and a way to remember to use it. Her reminding method ultimately fails, but she stumbles across the letter she wrote to herself and goes to carry out the plan. What's clear to the reader is that her husband John found the "out" and disposed of it at some prior point in time. Alice is too far gone to care or even remember that she found the letter or tried to carry out the plan.
And that's not even the bitter part for me. The bitter part is that after he eliminates her escape plan, he ultimately can't bear to stick around and watch the end. I am struggling to find sympathy in me for his character when I feel he has betrayed her - that he exposed himself as a coward and hypocrite. Not to mention being unwilling to honor her wishes, expressed when she was still of sound mind. He makes some comments to their children about Alice's "unilateral decision" that didn't get carried out, but he made one of his own without talking to the rest of the family.
What's right? How do we come to grips with these most painful of decisions? Is it possible to make good decisions about when suicide will be the good option? Is loss of self sufficient grounds? Was John right to do what he did? How can we care for our loved ones in the face of this kind of pain? As an aside, I have NOT had to deal with any sort of dementia in my immediate family. At least not yet.After reading this book, I sort of think watching a loved one go into that dark night would be worse than going there myself.
If you have read this book, I welcome your comments about these and any other issues raised in it.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The B**ch is Back - Growly Girl Earns Her Name
Hi there! I am hijacking Mom's blog to give all my friends this update cuz there are just too many lovely twitter pals that I want to share with.
I am feeling much better today. When mom came home tonight and gave me my meds, I GROWLED and GROWLED at her! Yucky meds! (Just so you know, I never bite or scratch but I do growl - a lot - when I am cranky). My leg is still swollen some but I can put some weight on it now and I am moving around the house a lot more.
Mom and I are very grateful for all the healing paws and purrs, and pawcircles, and prayers and good wishes from you, my Twitter friends. You are the bestest friends a little cat could have!
Hopefully the swelling will go down soon, but I still have EIGHT more days of antibiotics to go. I will keep you posted on my progress.
Love,
@grrrkitty
I am feeling much better today. When mom came home tonight and gave me my meds, I GROWLED and GROWLED at her! Yucky meds! (Just so you know, I never bite or scratch but I do growl - a lot - when I am cranky). My leg is still swollen some but I can put some weight on it now and I am moving around the house a lot more.
Mom and I are very grateful for all the healing paws and purrs, and pawcircles, and prayers and good wishes from you, my Twitter friends. You are the bestest friends a little cat could have!
Hopefully the swelling will go down soon, but I still have EIGHT more days of antibiotics to go. I will keep you posted on my progress.
Love,
@grrrkitty
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Summing up: Don't let them cheat you!
I recently posted a series of articles about health insurance and how to tell if your doctor's office is committing fraud. I thought that was the end, but it wasn't. I feel compelled to sum up.
Part 1 is a description of fee-for-service health insurance in the US, including lots of boring terminology.
Part 2 is a description of how health insurance claims work, and how to tell what you should pay the doctor.
Part 3 describes my personal experience of how a medical practice tried to cheat ME.
So what can you do? Here are the steps to take:
Part 1 is a description of fee-for-service health insurance in the US, including lots of boring terminology.
Part 2 is a description of how health insurance claims work, and how to tell what you should pay the doctor.
Part 3 describes my personal experience of how a medical practice tried to cheat ME.
So what can you do? Here are the steps to take:
- Understand your insurance policy. Read and keep your benefit booklet. If you don't understand it, call your insurance company and ask questions.
- Don't agree to be cheated. At the doctor's office, refuse to sign any document that says you agree to pay the difference between what the insurance company allows and the doctor charges for covered services. (Yes, this happened to a friend of mine. They tried twice to get him to sign something like that, and the second time they slipped it in with a bunch of other papers.)
- Stand up for yourself. If you have a plan where you have to pay for things yourself to satisfy a deductible, refuse to pay until the claim settles. If they are trying to insist, get IN WRITING what their refund policy is should they happen to charge you too much. If they won't do this, or you are not satisfied by what they tell you, walk out without paying a dime. They can't physically restrain you! You can pay them after you get the EOB and know what you actually owe.
- READ YOUR EOB. And keep it, just in case. If you don't understand it, call your insurance company. They can and will answer any questions you have.
Is Your Doctor's Office Trying to Cheat You? Part 3
My EOB for my last doctor visit has an interesting statement on it:
"This document outlines your share of the charges for services. You should use this to determine how much you need to pay. If there is a discrepancy, use this summary to to discuss the charges with your provider."
This is a new message, and it's a perfect lead in to this last part of my little mini-series. Is your doctor's office trying to cheat you? If they are trying to bill you for more than the insurance company says you owe, then YES they are.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series outlined how all the pieces (networks, claims, and money) fit together. Here's my personal story about the weasel tactics one office tried to pull.
Two years ago, in 2009, I chose a high-deductible health plan from my options at work because it seemed like made financial sense. During that year, I needed to have a suspicious lesion removed from my leg. The nature of my coverage meant that I would be paying for the whole procedure myself, and it counted against my deductible. It wasn't that much, as medical procedures go, only about $150. On the way out of course is where you stop at the billing window. I argued with them there at the billing window for half an hour about what I should pay that day. They insisted that I needed to pay the whole amount they wanted to charge, and I insisted that we didn't actually know how their charges lined up to the insurance company agreed-on amounts.
They were impervious to that argument, and swore to me that their charges were the same as the allowed amounts.So fine, I finally gave in and paid them what they asked. About a week later, they sent me a bill for one more charge that they had missed that day, for another $6 or so.At that point, however, I wasn't paying another penny until I saw how the claim settled.
Sure enough, a few days after that the EOB arrived and showed that I had, in fact paid too much already. I really had only owed them $145. The charges that had been filed to the insurance included the extra $6 so I knew they owed me money at that point.I just figured I would get a refund the next time I went in.
I'm sure you can imagine my surprise at that next visit, when I stopped at the billing window to pay my copay for that visit and they tried to make me PAY THEM the $6 they said I still owed!! I had to make them call the central billing office. The person there not only erased (I thought) the $6 but backed off the extra $5 from what I paid that day. At that point we were even.
Six months later (Nov 2010), what do you think I got in the mail? You guessed it - a bill for the $11 plus interest. I called them and accused them of balance billing and told them I didn't owe them a penny. After more than one lengthy time on hold and a recap of the whole history, they said basically that because it was only $12 they were going to write it off. I'm thinking, damn right you are! But they did NOT admit that they were doing anything wrong.
So, fine. That was that, or so I thought. However, at the end of February 2011, once again! I received a bill for the same $11 plus interest. The bill was identical to the one I'd received last November, and basically called me a deadbeat for not paying these charges that were not covered by my insurance. So much for them writing it off.
At this point, I was seriously pissed off. But this time I was smarter. I called my insurance company and asked if they could help.Once the CSR (customer service rep) determined what was going on, he offered to conference in the billing office right on the spot and get it taken care of once and for all.And he proceeded to do just that. It's amazing how the 500-lb gorilla can whip things into shape! It was not pretty. They jerked us around, passed us to several different people, put us on hold more than once, and even disconnected the call at one point. Undeterred, my CSR in shining armor got them to finally agree, once more, to write off the bill. Interestingly, they used pretty much the exact same wording they had used in November. Without admitting that they were balance-billing, they said it had been so long and was such a small amount that they were going to just write it off. Beyond that, he extracted a commitment that they would send me a letter saying I owed them nothing. Which I received a few days later. Trust me when I tell you I have it filed away with all the other paperwork around this!
So I am quite sure that this office does this whenever they can. If I didn't know how this all worked, or didn't bother to read my EOB, or wasn't willing to fight for $11, they would have been a little bit richer. Multiply that by hundreds of patients and thousands of doctor visits, and they are raking a tidy sum via this kind of fraud.
Needless to say, I no longer go there. And I'm kind of sad about that, because I liked my doctor. But I won't do business with criminals. And I'm thinking that there's a lot of this happening these days, hence the new message on my latest EOB. In this particular instance, the insurance company is on my side, and I like that.
As a final side note, I found out who my CSR was that day and his boss's name. I sent the boss an email telling her how wonderful my CSR was, and copied him on it.
This Series:
Part 1 is a description of fee-for-service health insurance in the US, including lots of boring terminology.
Part 2 is a description of how health insurance claims work, and how to tell what you should pay the doctor.
Next: Summing Up: Don't Let them cheat you
"This document outlines your share of the charges for services. You should use this to determine how much you need to pay. If there is a discrepancy, use this summary to to discuss the charges with your provider."
This is a new message, and it's a perfect lead in to this last part of my little mini-series. Is your doctor's office trying to cheat you? If they are trying to bill you for more than the insurance company says you owe, then YES they are.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series outlined how all the pieces (networks, claims, and money) fit together. Here's my personal story about the weasel tactics one office tried to pull.
Two years ago, in 2009, I chose a high-deductible health plan from my options at work because it seemed like made financial sense. During that year, I needed to have a suspicious lesion removed from my leg. The nature of my coverage meant that I would be paying for the whole procedure myself, and it counted against my deductible. It wasn't that much, as medical procedures go, only about $150. On the way out of course is where you stop at the billing window. I argued with them there at the billing window for half an hour about what I should pay that day. They insisted that I needed to pay the whole amount they wanted to charge, and I insisted that we didn't actually know how their charges lined up to the insurance company agreed-on amounts.
They were impervious to that argument, and swore to me that their charges were the same as the allowed amounts.So fine, I finally gave in and paid them what they asked. About a week later, they sent me a bill for one more charge that they had missed that day, for another $6 or so.At that point, however, I wasn't paying another penny until I saw how the claim settled.
Sure enough, a few days after that the EOB arrived and showed that I had, in fact paid too much already. I really had only owed them $145. The charges that had been filed to the insurance included the extra $6 so I knew they owed me money at that point.I just figured I would get a refund the next time I went in.
I'm sure you can imagine my surprise at that next visit, when I stopped at the billing window to pay my copay for that visit and they tried to make me PAY THEM the $6 they said I still owed!! I had to make them call the central billing office. The person there not only erased (I thought) the $6 but backed off the extra $5 from what I paid that day. At that point we were even.
Six months later (Nov 2010), what do you think I got in the mail? You guessed it - a bill for the $11 plus interest. I called them and accused them of balance billing and told them I didn't owe them a penny. After more than one lengthy time on hold and a recap of the whole history, they said basically that because it was only $12 they were going to write it off. I'm thinking, damn right you are! But they did NOT admit that they were doing anything wrong.
So, fine. That was that, or so I thought. However, at the end of February 2011, once again! I received a bill for the same $11 plus interest. The bill was identical to the one I'd received last November, and basically called me a deadbeat for not paying these charges that were not covered by my insurance. So much for them writing it off.
At this point, I was seriously pissed off. But this time I was smarter. I called my insurance company and asked if they could help.Once the CSR (customer service rep) determined what was going on, he offered to conference in the billing office right on the spot and get it taken care of once and for all.And he proceeded to do just that. It's amazing how the 500-lb gorilla can whip things into shape! It was not pretty. They jerked us around, passed us to several different people, put us on hold more than once, and even disconnected the call at one point. Undeterred, my CSR in shining armor got them to finally agree, once more, to write off the bill. Interestingly, they used pretty much the exact same wording they had used in November. Without admitting that they were balance-billing, they said it had been so long and was such a small amount that they were going to just write it off. Beyond that, he extracted a commitment that they would send me a letter saying I owed them nothing. Which I received a few days later. Trust me when I tell you I have it filed away with all the other paperwork around this!
So I am quite sure that this office does this whenever they can. If I didn't know how this all worked, or didn't bother to read my EOB, or wasn't willing to fight for $11, they would have been a little bit richer. Multiply that by hundreds of patients and thousands of doctor visits, and they are raking a tidy sum via this kind of fraud.
Needless to say, I no longer go there. And I'm kind of sad about that, because I liked my doctor. But I won't do business with criminals. And I'm thinking that there's a lot of this happening these days, hence the new message on my latest EOB. In this particular instance, the insurance company is on my side, and I like that.
As a final side note, I found out who my CSR was that day and his boss's name. I sent the boss an email telling her how wonderful my CSR was, and copied him on it.
This Series:
Part 1 is a description of fee-for-service health insurance in the US, including lots of boring terminology.
Part 2 is a description of how health insurance claims work, and how to tell what you should pay the doctor.
Next: Summing Up: Don't Let them cheat you
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