Paying for It

When I got the bill for my July Obamacare premium, I shrugged it off.

See, I had changed from a Blue Cross Standard Gold Obamacare plan to a Blue Cross Medicare plan as of July 1 and I figured that was just a bill that got mailed the day they got the cancellation.

When I got the bill for my August Obamacare premium on July 5, I shouldn’t have shrugged it off.

When I got the bill for my September Obamacare premium dated August 5 in today’s mail, I couldn’t shrug it off.

Note from your doctor explaining why you were tardyTwo months bill from Vermont Health ExchangeAnd it turns out I wasn’t alone. The Burlington Free Press reported yesterday that billing problems plague Vermont Health Connect, the state-managed Health Exchange that issues and bills for Obamacare policies.

“Terry Libby has received incorrect bills from Vermont Health Connect since last winter when she first signed up for a Blue Cross insurance plan using the state’s new online website.

“Each month she has paid what she owed, called the state’s helpline to report she was being charged double, and received assurance the problem would be corrected.

“A month later, another incorrect bill would arrive.

“A week ago, however, she received a shock — a bill for $4,662.32.”

Four thousand, six hundred sixty-two dollars.

Jeezum. They’ve billed me only $497.06 no $994.12 no $1,491.18. So far. For.A.Policy.I.Do.Not.Have. I feel like such a piker. I’m sure I’ll catch up.

I’m more than a little nervous about screwing with my Medicare policy. Blue Cross carried over my same policy number when I changed from Obamacare to Medicare.

I called VHicks (the correct pronunciation of VHX, the Vermont Health Exchange, according to my Blue Cross rep) to question the bill they sent me. See, I had gone over this very issue in depth when I bought the Medicare policy. Blue Cross said they would cancel me out of the Obamacare plan when they opened the Medicare plan. All part of the service.

The VHicks rep said it wasn’t up to Blue Cross to cancel the policy. He said he’d try to process the cancellation retroactively but no guarantees.

Retroactively?

I called Blue Cross.

“No worries,” that rep told me. “Your Obamacare plan ended June 30 and your MediGap started July 1.” She also said no way VHX had any way whatsoever to cancel my Medigap policy.

I hate this.

“The government is so not trustable about things like this,” Liz Arden said.

“Not so trustable? Can you spell C-H-A-R-L-I-E   F-O-X-T-R-O-T?” Rufus asked only somewhat rhetorically.

“There is no way on God’s green Earth we should be putting up with this level of …. well, it ain’t mediocrity, because that would be far superior to what we are getting.

“You can quote Rufus on that.”

There ya go.

“You don’t want people to get health care!” Annabelle Proctor screeched the last time I wrote. Ms. Proctor holds an undergraduate degree in dance from Bennington College and a graduate degree in Social Justice from Planet Marlboro, Vermont’s two most liberal and free-thinking schools.

My other Liberal friends all seem to echo that.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I want my doc and yours to do better doctoring than they do today.

I want every citizen to have access to whatever doctor or other healer they want.

I want every visitor to be able to pay Fee for Service to whatever doctor or other healer they want.

I want the cost (not just my bill) to be less than a Moon shot.

Just like it was in 1976 when five days in Cabarrus County Memorial Hospital cost me $254 after a racing accident. That’s less than a hammer, a toilet seat, or a week’s worth of Starbuck$.

And I certainly don’t want the folks who brought us $436 hammers, $640 toilet seats, and $7,600 coffee makers to flush my policy when it gives me a heart attack.

Yep, we’re paying for it now.

 

Do You Want Fries with That?

Yes or No.

Pierre Krahenbuhl, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, appeared on CBS Face the Nation yesterday for a quick question-and-answer.

OK, maybe not so quick.

Mr. Krahenbuhl used 450 words — about the length of a typical newspaper editorial — to avoid answering two simple, yes or no, questions: Are your facilities protecting Hamas members? and Is Hamas using children as human shields?

Norah O’Donnell sat in for long time CBS host Bob Schieffer.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Are your facilities protecting members of Hamas?

Pretty simple yes or no question, wouldn’t you think?

PIERRE KRAHENBUHL: Look, I think what you have to get a sense of is we have two hundred fifty thousand people now sheltered in our schools as a result of the intensity of the conflict that is going on in Gaza. Some of these people have received instructions from the Israeli Defense Forces to leave areas that they were living in. Others fled the fighting. And because we have numerous school buildings throughout the Gaza Strip, we have been able to accommodate them in about ninety school buildings. And so this is very clear under international law that these are premises that are protected. The sanctity of which have to be respected by all parties and so, of course, when they are shelled it is something that is unacceptable in any sense. Now, we have also had incidents — and there were three — in the course of inspections we carried out we have identified weapons caches that were in the premises, something that we made known to the world in a very proactive and transparent way because those ways of endangering our premises by placing weapons in them are unacceptable and we condemn them unreservedly.

192 words.

It was a “yes” or “no” question.

“Can I rinse your plate?” SWMBO asked as we finished breakfast right after hearing that.

“Well in the grand scheme of the surface chemistry, as we study the chemical reactions at the interfaces, we’re really looking at heterogeneous catalysis. The adhesion of the food molecules to the plate is known as adsorption. This can be due to either chemisorption or by physisorption. … ” I began, just getting wound up.

“It was a yes or no question.”

NORAH O’DONNELL: Mm-Hm.

“There are 1,500 dead Palestinians, you know,” my friend Nola Guay said. “That far outnumbers the 64 Israelis killed. How is it fair that so few Israelis are getting killed?”

What, are you nuts? I’m thinking when you poke a bear with more than 2,500 rockets, you gotta prepare to pay the price.

Ms. O’Donnell asked the most important questions.

NORAH O’DONNELL: Israel says that Hamas is using civilians, children as human shield. Is that what you found?

Ms. O’Donnell asks yes or no questions, doesn’t she?

PIERRE KRAHENBUHL: What we’ve found and what we know is that when armed forces be it in this case, the Israeli Defense Force or non-state arm groups as the groups present inside Gaza, all of them are bound by rules of international law and humanitarian law which regulate the way in which military operations and combat is taking place in any conflict around the world. And in the case of Gaza, because of its very densely populated environment, all of these military operations have a great risk of endangering the civilians. And that is the case for all of the actors involved. Yes, there are certainly behaviors that expose the population on the ground by militant groups that operate close to civilian premises. But, certainly, if you look at the extent of the damage, the extent of the physical destruction but also the extent of the loss of human life and I witnessed that myself visiting this week the pediatric ward in the main hospital in Gaza seeing the broken bodies of the children there, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that insufficient measures of precaution and control and protection are being taken, including by the Israeli Defense Force when engaging in Gaza. And the message I’ve heard repeatedly this week by civilians in Gaza is that they don’t feel safe anywhere. And what they’ve been saying to me is if we are not safe in an UNRWA school building, where are we going to be safe.

Mm-Hm.

247 words this time and not a single “yes” or “no” to be found.

Ms. O’Donnell asked the two most important questions. And she didn’t get an answer.


Worth noting is this commentary that Mr. Schieffer offered on Face the Nation last week:
In the Middle East, the Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist group that has embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed in order to build sympathy for its cause, a strategy that might actually be working, at least in some quarters. Last week, I found a quote of many years ago by Golda Meir, one of Israel’s early leaders, which might have been said yesterday. “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children, she said, “but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

That was just 96 words.

Mr. Krahenbuhl and the agency charged to maintain international peace and security could take a lesson. So could the Hamas apologists who conveniently forget those inconvenient 2,500 rockets.