March 18, 2016
Dear Everyone:
I turned 65 this week. I
knew it was coming because I received a notice from Company back in
November, announcing that I would soon be qualified for
Medicare and that I barely had time to start filling out forms for
them.
It seems that once Medicare becomes the “Primary Payer” for health
issues, the
insurance company becomes the “Secondary Payer”, which suits them
just fine. They wanted to
make sure that I got my Medicare ID card in plenty of time to “enroll”
in one of four possible “secondary” plans before the middle of January.
They even provided some “comparison shopping” charts to show what each
plan would cost me. When I
realized that my monthly premium payments would drop by about $1400 it
was incentive enough to ensure that I found the proper website and
filled out the form Quick like a Bunny.
As soon as I received the Medicare ID card, I called the 800 number on
the notice to “enroll”. And
you had to call, not just fill out the enclosed form and send it in.
The notice was very specific:
You MUST CALL THIS NUMBER, not just fill out the form and send it
in.
“Did you get a form in the mail?” asked the person at the call center.
I had.
“Then fill it out and send it in.”
So much for “enrolling”.
I have long made it a point to pay the health insurance monthly premium
a month in advance, just in case something gets lost in the mail.
When I got the “bill” for March, it showed a credit of over
$1400. Each month since, the
“bill” shows up with a little over $200 nibbled out of the credit.
By my calculations, I will actually start paying that bill in
September. In the meantime,
all that lovely “extra cash” is chomping through the balance in my
VISA account.
One of the advantages of growing older:
Lower monthly premiums.
Another advantage:
Experience.
People keep saying
Donny the Trumpet has no experience in politics so he can’t possible
make a good
President. I remember
when they said the same thing about
Ronald Reagan.
Yes, the same “Saint” Ronald that all
Republicans are invoking now.
And I remember when “faithless, boorish, racist, misogynistic” were
terms used to describe not Donny today, but
George Wallace
when he
ran for President. So I
can take a smugly experienced “let’s wait and see” approach to the whole
thing.
Remember when you were young and older people would say something like,
“You’ll understand when you’re older”?
It was galling. It was
insulting. It was
patronizing. It was also
horribly, horribly true.
Now I am older and yes, I do understand some things that didn’t make
much sense half a century ago.
Nevertheless, “You’ll understand when you’re older” is still code for
“I’m too inarticulate and/or too lazy to take the time to explain
something so just wait 50 years.”
By which time they hope you’ve forgotten all about it.
Because they’ve forgotten all about it, too.
Love, as always,
Pete
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