The administrative outrages of poor health

I’d like to think I’m of at least average intelligence, have a reasonable capacity with numbers, and I’ve dealt with more than my share of contracts and financial documents before.

I read every thick packet of documents from my insurers and from our hospitals and doctors, have spent months making sure I understand our policies, and yet at least once a week I realize I really have no idea just how financially fucked we are, or even how to tell if and when.

This system is incredibly broken.

I receive cheerful letters from insurers approving treatments weeks after they were performed – treatments that are part of a protocol designed and agreed to months ago, and for which the necessity of these ongoing, opaque, and inexplicable “approvals” are nothing more or less than a threat to my family’s welfare, and yet I must be reminded of the capacity for capricious damage these companies hold over me.

I receive statements showing how much the hospital has billed my insurers and I can only focus for so long on the fact that if my insurance lapses, or someday just refuses to cover a small fraction of his treatment, that we’d be instantly wiped out financially.

I sit in between a hospital and the doctors, two insurers, a state and federal government, each of which has the extraordinary power to ruin lives and over which I have no power at all.

I say all of this having already come to terms with losing all our savings, and then some, before this is all over knowing full well that we might have to hit zero before we can have any peace of mind regarding the last thing a family should ever have to worry about – going broke saving their child’s life.

I say this outraged, knowing full well we have it better than so many other families; that I can earn my way out of a hole; that I can read and process and deal with many of these administrative complexities; that we live in a state, Pennsylvania, that is one of the least worst states in the country for families like mine. We are, relatively, lucky.