Ég haaaaata heilsutryggingarnar í USA
[I absolutely abhor the health insurance system in the USA. Actually, I hate it, loathe it and despise it. I just received two bills in the mail from the hospital, and they caused me to spend the better part of the afternoon on the phone. Now, in any other civilized country, say Iceland, you pay a small co-pay for health care. I’m not even sure if you pay for hospital admissions, but usually you pay one (and only one) bill up front, but occasionally you pay it after the fact.
Now, here in this for-profit, fractured health insurance landscape, I have to personally spend my time checking to see if every single bill is correctly processed. Which would be ok-ish if there were only a handful of bills. But no, for some arcane reason, the doctors themselves bill the hospital for their time, resulting in a bill for every single time a doctor looks your way. Bjarki now has more than 60 bills to his name. Thankfully I think the hospital bill (for the room, supplies and stuff, anything but the doctors) is lumped together in one visit, so the paperwork avalanche is potentially smaller.
So what am I whining about? Well, to date, the insurance company has mis-processed two pregnancy screenings, leaving me with $250 in incorrect charges (1 call to insurer, 1 to hospital billing). Also, while they were fixing their first round of processing, some contract changed and the hospital ended up still billing me $7 (1 call to hospital billing and 1 call to the insurer). To boot, Bjarki’s insurance company sent us multiple “explanation of benefits” claiming they surely weren’t the primary insurance, and could we please call them about that (2 calls to the insurer, 1 call to hospital billing to tell them about the problem and that we’re not paying the $3,123 they’re billing us). Bjarki also has Medi-Cal insurance while he’s in the hospital, but that one weirdly and randomly starts on July 01 (2 calls to find out), so it doesn’t cover his hospital stay, which started on Jun 28th (2 calls to the hospital billing). Then I had to call about Finnur’s dental insurance (1 call to the insurer, 1 to the dentist to tell them they were wrong). And I haven’t even started getting the bills for myself and Reynir! GAAAAAA!
Other than that, I’m still stuck at home. I did help out at daycare this morning, but other than that I’ve slept, fixed our camera, eaten and cursed the insurance system. Bjarki had a rough day yesterday and last night, so this morning they stopped the fortifier and upped the flow on his cannula to make into a “poor man’s CPAP”. It’s virtually certain now that he’s refluxing from his stomach, but the acidity study won’t be done until Monday at the earliest so he can’t get medications until maybe Tuesday or Wednesday. Until then he’ll probably keep desatting as usual. Poor kid. After they made the above changes, he’s apparently been doing much better today, so we hope he’ll keep that up.]
Stutt þýðing. Ég haaaaata bandaríska heilsutryggingakerfið. Ef einhverjum hálfvita eða hálfvitu dettur í hug að koma einhverju slíku á fót á Íslandi, þá flytjum við til Frakklands!!
Ég er ennþá föst heima. Hjálpaði til á leikskólanum í dag, en svaf annars bara, át og lagaði myndavélina. Og já eyddi síðdeginu hringjandi í tryggingarnar og innheimtudeildina á spítalanum. GAAAAA!
Bjarki átti frekar slæman dag í gær og nótt svo þau hættu að styrkja brjóstamjólkina með formúlu og juku flæðið á nefrörinu til að búa til þykistu nefpúst. Honum gekk mikið betur eftir það og nú er bara að bíða eftir maga-upp-flæðis skoðuninni sem verður eftir helgi. Vonandi verður helgin ekki of erfið fyrir greyið.
