Nothing for Free (or The "What Else is New, Please Get a New Bone, Woman" Rant)

I have discovered that the price for receiving government services, federal, state, local, paid, free or otherwise, is the sanity of those who must deal with the government agency providing those services. My God. The paperwork. The details. The hoops. The flame-breathing dragons. They will zap your energy and kill your soul. And that's just been this morning. Y'all it has been a MORNING.

And funnily, not even related to this morning: Yesterday, we got a fancy, glossy flyer saying I should call and thank my Congressman who "fought to provide 11 million children with health care coverage through the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)." Each state runs its own CHIP. As it does its own Medicaid Program. Do I need to tell you how Alabama has messed up Medicaid? It has taken Tater a year to get Medicaid through Alabama's Elderly and Disabled Waiver program and he is considered to be a technology dependent child. Can you imagine how hard it will be for a normal child to get insurance?! From Alabama's CHIP, All Kids', website: "Eligibility for ALL Kids is determined, in part, by family size and income." Okay, THAT tells me a lot.

Do you think I am calling my Congressman to thank him for this program? Hell no. I am writing him a lengthy letter thanking him for helping out a lot of children, sure, but also telling him about the number of small, middle class families who are either left out of such programs or made to jump through such hoops to get them that it would be easier to just outright lose their jobs so they qualify for Medicaid based on income. I swear it shouldn’t be this hard to get health coverage for our children. I say this again and again and I know I’m a broken record, but! I have a college degree, I have taken graduate business classes in a fairly difficult program, I am considered to be well read and quick on the uptake, and if I am having a hard time dealing with this crap, then how in the world is someone less fortunate than I am going to be able to it deal with it?!

Tater now has real Medicaid (as opposed to loophole Medicaid) as secondary insurance to his private insurance, on which he is quickly approaching the lifetime cap for benefits. If Tater continues to do as well as he has been and is able to get rid of his trach, he could lose Medicaid because he no longer qualifies based on medical necessity. What happens then? I don’t know many families who can afford to pay outright for medical insurance. We’re already cutting out many of our humble luxuries to make ends meet now. We save and we don’t live extravagantly. We pay our taxes and we’re good people. And yet. Our wonderful, booger of a son may very well be left without medical insurance if current policies aren’t changed. I’m still trying to figure out what my role will be in making sure this doesn’t happen to him or the many other children in his place. You can bet there will be a fight. And that I'm taking freshman comp over so I stop writing in run-on sentences.