Failed Medicare Moment: From the official brochure—
Medicare Part B also covers mental health services that you generally get as an outpatient or outside of a hospital, including visits with the following:
A psychiatrist or other doctor
A clinical psychologist
A clinical social worker
Certain other health care professionals
Last week a clinical social worker told me that she will not accept Medicare for psychotherapy. Last year she did accept Medicare but it never paid her. She said she filed and re-filed the paper work half a dozen times.
You have lost a care provider because Medicare does not maintain a useful system for prompt payment.
Failed Medicaid Moment: My home health care nurse comes every thirty days (plus or minus five days) to change the catheter that was inserted in the hospital on July 29. She also has to come every sixty days (plus or minus five) from August 15, the day I was admitted to home care, to recertify my eligibility. With the
exception of having me sign papers, the routine things that she does for certification are things she also does when she comes to change the catheter. The two visits cannot be combined because of bureaucratic nonsense. A registered nurse’s average hourly wage is $32.56.
You are paying for bureaucratic nursing visits that are not medically necessary.
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About annecwoodlen
I am a tenth generation American, descended from a family that has been working a farm that was deeded to us by William Penn. The country has changed around us but we have held true. I stand in my grandmother’s kitchen, look down the valley to her brother’s farm and see my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Hannah standing on the porch. She is holding the baby, surrounded by four other children, and saying goodbye to her husband and oldest son who are going off to fight in the Revolutionary War. The war is twenty miles away and her husband will die fighting. We are not the Daughters of the American Revolution; we were its mothers.
My father, Milton C. Woodlen, got his doctorate from Temple University in the 1940’s when—in his words—“a doctorate still meant something.” He became an education professor at West Chester State Teachers College, where my mother, Elizabeth Hope Copeland, had graduated. My mother raised four girls and one boy, of which I am the middle child. My parents are deceased and my siblings are estranged.
My fiancé, Robert H. Dobrow, was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. In 1974, his plane crashed, his parachute did not open, and we buried him in a cemetery on Long Island. I could say a great deal about him, or nothing; there is no middle ground. I have loved other men; Bob was my soul mate.
The single greatest determinate of who I am and what my life has been is that I inherited my father’s gene for bipolar disorder, type II. Associated with all bipolar disorders is executive dysfunction, a learning disability that interferes with the ability to sort and organize. Despite an I.Q. of 139, I failed twelve subjects and got expelled from high school and prep school. I attended Syracuse University and Onondaga Community College and got an associate’s degree after twenty-five years. I am nothing if not tenacious.
Gifted with intelligence, constrained by disability, and compromised by depression, my employment was limited to entry level jobs. Being female in the 1960’s meant that I did office work—billing at the university library, calling out telegrams at Western Union, and filing papers at a law firm. During one decade, I worked at about a hundred different places as a temporary secretary. I worked for hospitals, banks, manufacturers and others, including the county government. I quit the District Attorney’s Office to manage a gas station; it was more honest work.
After Bob’s death, I started taking antidepressants. Following doctor’s orders, I took them every day for twenty-six years. During that time, I attempted%2
