A(nother) Short Story about the State of US Healthcare

Who wants a “pre-existing condition” these days?

I thought I’d take a moment to share a few recent thoughts related to the healthcare situation in the United States.

I’m in my late 50s now and have, for the first time, begun spending a lot of time doing close work with my hands. Making jewelry with fine wire and small tools doesn’t put a lot of strain on my hands, but it apparently does work the muscles and joints more than I’m accustomed to.

Arthritis runs in my family. I clearly remember my grandmother on my mother’s side, who lived to be about 90, complaining about it once in a while. She had typical “old lady hands,” that included thick knuckles and crooked joints under wrinkled skin. She’d spent nearly a lifetime doing close work with her hands in a garment factory, starting work when she was as young as 13 and working until many years later when my grandfather had a stroke and she had to stay home to care for him.

I’ve had knee problems on and off throughout my life. They always got worse when I was heavier and disappeared when I lost a lot of weight back in 2012. But before they disappeared — back when I had a lot of disposable income and a decent health care plan — I went to a doctor about it. Arthritis, he said, pointing at the x-rays.

Handxray
X-ray of a hand from Wikipedia. I’ve got my own x-rays around here somewhere.

More recently, a fall off the back of my truck that sprained an ankle apparently fractured some bones in my left wrist, which I’d landed on. While trying to diagnose the occasional swelling and severe pain (caused by “floating bodies,” we later discovered during arthroscopic surgery that removed most of them), the doctor took x-rays. He pointed out the early signs of arthritis in my wrists and hands.

So yeah. I have arthritis.

It’s gotten to the point that it’s starting to bother me enough to seek medical solutions that don’t necessarily include painkillers. (I can take Vitamin I (ibuprofen) without a doctor telling me to, and I’m not interested in anything stronger.) Would exercises help? CBD creams (as everyone keeps telling me)? Heat or ice therapy? Vitamin supplements? I’m not interested in querying Dr. Google because we all know that there’s enough bad advice there to drown out the good advice. I want to visit a doctor, have her take new x-rays, and tell me what I can do to slow the progression of this very common problem.

And here’s the rub.

If I go to an arthritis specialist — provided I can get an appointment with one — I’m making a very public (on my medical records) statement that I have a medical problem bad enough to seek medical help. In other words, I’m admitting I have a condition that, once admitted, becomes a “pre-existing” condition for future health care coverage.

Now, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, AKA “Obamacare”), as it was passed by the government and enacted into law, pre-existing conditions didn’t matter. But things are different now.

Let me tell you another story about pre-existing conditions prior to the ACA.

Years ago, when I was very heavy, I was having digestive issues that included GERD, heartburn, acid reflux, and vomiting. To this day, I think it was a hiatal hernia but at the time I was unable to find a doctor to offer any advice beyond “take Pepcid AC.” Back in those days, I made the fatal error of mentioning “chest pain” as a symptom. As you might imagine, that triggered a flurry of heart tests, all of which came back negative. I did not have a heart problem, I had a digestive problem. I blogged about this in detail way back in 2010.

This profit-driven nonsense established me in medical records with a “pre-existing heart condition” that didn’t exist. All of the tests came back negative! So when my idiot wasband lost his job (again), made a late COBRA payment, and got our health insurance canceled, the insurance company refused to cover me when they started the insurance back up. I had a “pre-existing heart condition,” they said.

For six of the scariest months of my life, I had no health insurance because a couple of greedy doctors put me through a battery of unnecessary heart tests and an idiot couldn’t manage his money properly. It wasn’t scary because of my health. It was scary because if, during the time I was uninsured, I got some kind of real negative health diagnosis (think cancer) or had an accident at home (think falling down the stairs) that put me into the hospital or long term treatment, I could lose everything I owned. Medical bankruptcy is a real thing here in the United States and I was set up to become a victim.

I got limited insurance coverage back and later got my own damn insurance again so I didn’t have to worry about an idiot screwing things up for me. The ACA really helped things; it was as if those old medical issues simply didn’t exist. And, so far, I haven’t had insurance denied because of these things — although the rate has gone up dramatically since Trump took office. Next year, who knows?

So here I am in 2019. I have arthritis in my hands and want help to prevent it from getting worse quickly. But I’m afraid to make an appointment with a specialist because I’m afraid to get the condition on my medical records. So instead, I’ll keep waiting, letting the condition likely get worse. All because I don’t want to be denied insurance coverage in the future.

Is it right? Does it makes sense? No and no. But there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it other than emigrate to a country with decent health care for all. And believe me, I’ve been thinking about it.

So that’s my situation as I type this.

At least the CBD cream smells nice.

Why I Blocked You on Twitter

The answer to a question I received by email.

The other day, I got the following email message through the message form on this blog:

Just curious. Why did you block me on Twitter? @[redacted]

Was interested in following your flight home with the new bird.

I honestly don’t remember blocking this specific person. I probably block about a dozen people a week.

Twitter LogoThe reason I usually block people is because of their unreasonably voiced political views. You know the kind of folks I mean: the ones who watch Fox News and echo the bullshit they’ve been fed there. The ones with #MAGA in their Twitter profiles. The ones who share obnoxious memes that bash Obama or Clinton or liberals in general.

Yes, I’ll admit it: I block Trump supporters who attempt to interact with me on Twitter. I honestly have no time or patience for their bullshit. I am a New Yorker at heart and, like most New Yorkers with a brain, I know that Donald Trump is a conman. During the 2016 presidential election, he conned the same kind of people he conned into signing up for Trump University: the desperate and the gullible. I am neither and no one will ever get me to support him.

And frankly, I’m offended by the kinds of things his supporters do and say to attack the people who don’t support him.

Twitter is a haven for these people. They make a game out of preying on people who don’t agree with them, using personal attacks and ridicule, often getting other Trump supporters to join them. They try to make a living hell for the people they find on Twitter who dare to question their glorious leader. It’s fortunate that Twitter makes it easy to prevent these people from targeting us — that’s what the Block feature is for and I’m not afraid to use it.

So there’s a good chance that’s why I blocked the person who emailed me last week. I was simply heading off what I thought might be a Trump supporter following me to see Tweets he could attack. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.

If I erred and he really was interested in following my trip, he would have been disappointed anyway. I didn’t tweet much along the way. And a blog post about it will be posted here shortly; he can always read that to catch up.

And if that’s truly all he wanted from me, I do apologize. But if he’d been on the receiving end of as many Trump supporter attacks as I have on Twitter, I think he’d understand.

Open Letter to My Facebook Friends

A version of what I posted on Facebook yesterday.

Facebook LogoOkay, folks. Most of you should know that I’ve pretty much removed myself from Facebook, popping in now and then just to share a link to a blog post and comment on friends’ posts. I went from being on Facebook for more than an hour a day to being here less than an hour a week and I love having that time back in my life.

I’m still on Twitter a lot and although I know a lot of you “don’t get” Twitter, I do and I really enjoy it. One reason: every tweet from every person I follow always appears in my newsfeed, in reverse chronological order. In other words, Twitter doesn’t use algorithms to decide what I should see and bury the rest.

I’ve been wanting to delete my Facebook account for quite some time now and recent news is making me think again about how foolish it is to participate in a social network that manipulates what content appears for me and other users. I’m very upset that the manipulation has changed how some of my friends and family members think about what’s going on in the world and the amount of hate the content they share seems to generate.

In short: I feel that Facebook and its paying advertisers are brainwashing users, making the people in the country I love ever more divided. I don’t want to be part of that in any way.

So there’s a pretty good chance that the blog post link I share in a moment will be the last one I share here. And an equally good chance that I’ll be deleting my Facebook content and account very soon.

That said, I’d like to keep in touch with all of you. Although I assume that Facebook’s algorithms will show this to a tiny percentage of the 300+ friends and hundreds of followers I still have here, I’m asking those of you who see this to take a moment and let me know where else I can find you online: your Twitter name, blog URL, email address, and/or cell phone number. You can put it in a private message if you like. I want to keep in touch with the folks I like, but I don’t want to do it on Facebook.

I hope you understand.