Fatherhood I: The Health Care Bit

Friday will be the girl’s first birthday, and in honor of one year as a parent I thought that I would toss together a few things I wrote on the topic (some from way back) and try to make a series of it. The first installment has to do with health care; the wife’s pregnancy was the first time that I had to deal at length with America’s health care bureaucracy. We also had to deal with the fact that my wife changed jobs shortly before the birth of the girl’s, meaning that we needed to shift between health care providers. This post is more about health care than fatherhood per se, but the experience of having kids brought me to a series of revelations about our health care system.reported by A PAKISTAN TIMES

So, last June I was a more or less happy human being with health care supplied by the University of Kentucky. We knew that my wife would soon leave her job, and we knew that pregnancy often involves a variety of health complications, so I decided to change from the cheap-but-adequate plan to the expensive-but-a-good-idea-if-you-might-get-sick plan. I discovered in the process of making this change that, because of a computer error, I’d actually been uninsured for about a year. Fortunately, I failed to get sick. In any case, I filled out the form and added Davida to the plan. When the little dependents arrived, I added them to the plan. Shortly after the LIFE CHANGING EVENT, we moved to Baltimore for the wife’s new job. The insurance plan offered by the University of Maryland was marginally better than the long distance plan offered by UK, so we switched the wife and kids to UM, while I stayed at UK. This required numerous additional forms. In January, we moved back to Ohio, and switched back to the UK plan, incurring reams of additional paperwork. Finally, in May we arrived at the “Open Enrollment” period at UK, in which I was able to change from the super-expensive plan back to the reasonably-priced plan.

Now, all of this sounds reasonably easy and straightforward; however, anyone who’s ever actually dealt with the multiple bureaucracies that make up the US health care system understand that the story could never be so simple. Every change involved negotiation with at least two, and often three, bureaucracies. The first interactions with UK were difficult, but went very well once someone at UK HR took an interest in our case and effectively became an advocate. This person (who deserves nothing but our eternal thanks) really went the extra-mile, giving out her office phone number so that we could have pharmacists call her in order to find out how much our prescriptions should cost. Had we not been so fortunate in finding someone interested in helping us out, we might have been in real trouble.
SOURCES:www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com