The series of bills showed up earlier this week, for the kids. Both had recently had annual check-ups, which the insurance is supposed to pay for, less the deductible. Ah, but they’d had eye tests during the check-ups; and eye tests are not covered.
Why wouldn’t eye tests be covered, you might ask? Good question; and in fact my wife is asking that very question right about now, in one of her never-ending series of phone calls to the insurer. You probably go through this yourself, spending minutes, even hours on the phone, back and forth, why wasn’t this covered, check your policy, but the policy says this and now you’re telling me that. We’ve caught them in several errors over the years - none of them intentional, but this is what happens when you have a system so complex, and humans, fallable as all of us, trying to interpret and apply it.
So maybe this is one of those errors. If not, we’re likely to be out a few hundred bucks for the eye tests that, somehow, are not important enough for the insurance to actually cover. And I want to stress: we are among the lucky ones.
Which brings us to a fine rant by John Aravosis in the same vein. Something, here, has got to give.
As a young 40-something myself, it scares the hell out of me that I have no idea what my health insurance does or doesn’t cover, whether my health insurance can or can’t drop me should I catch some horrible costly disease, whether I have a lifetime limit on my policy (which happened to a friend of Chris in Paris - caught something horrible, had $2m in medical payments, the company said bye-bye have a nice death), or the fact (that I just recently learned) that I lose my health insurance if I move to any other state from DC. Yep, I lose my coverage and have to start all over again, so the problems I’ve had with eyes, among other things, become “pre-existing conditions” and probably won’t be covered. So I can never leave DC again (unless I move to Europe, where I’ll be covered, but then can’t ever come back to the states since I won’t be covered). Then there’s a member of my family who is now being told that she may have to pay $11,000 out of her own pocket, PER EYE, to have a cataract removed. She had insurance, HAS insurance, has ALWAYS had insurance, but because she changed employment a few years back, her insurance changed, and her eye problems may now be excluded pre-existing conditions - sorry! So it’s potentially looking like $11k per eye or go blind at the age of 50.
“Socialized medicine” ain’t looking so bad when the alternative is being middle-class and going blind at 50. What is wrong with our country?
