(“Obamacare: Full
Adult Diaper?” is my subhead for this very occasional series, described here, subsection 6.)
[Edits 4/21/14. Edit 5/13/14, to End note. Edit 5/14/14, between asterisks.]
Before I get started, 20 years ago I was basically in favor
of the Clinton Administration’s attempt at looking into starting a nationally
instigated insurance plan. Here is a
letter I wrote in relation to this, later in 1994.
Times have changed.
Today (April 19), The
New York Times has a blurb on its Web site about an editorial (apparently)
where the point is (I paraphrase), “Now that the ACA is showing some success,
Democrats should start standing up for it.”
As someone who has voted Democratic for president every
election since 1984, and did not vote for Reagan in 1980, I say, “You can skip
over me on this one.”
On the same Times
Web site, there is an article showing worry about how, as millions more
Americans get coverage, with a recent up-tick in spending, government and the
private sector may face increased costs….
Ah. So now we see: It isn’t about getting all the lazy,
shiftless trash who “always” went to the ER because they didn’t have coverage,
to “be good Americans” and get coverage with the ACA.
I said in a March 13 update in the second installment of this series, about a third of the
way, or a quarter, into the entry, that I phoned again to the NJ FamilyCare office,
and got the same result as for the fourth
call noted in the original text of the entry. Well, I phoned more recently,
again, and I heard what I’d heard (via a computerized system) on two previous
calls: “This option is currently not available to you.” So I still didn’t know
where my application, originally made in December, stands.
Meanwhile, in March (and again in very early April), I got a
card in the mail, with the exact same content, from some entity called “Amerigroup RealSolutions,” asking
me to call them on a toll-free number because they want to “collect some
important information about your health.” This on the back of what amounts to a
big postcard. Nothing so classy as a confidential letter inside an envelope.
What kind of entity seriously involved in querying about my
health would contact me on the back of a postcard? (Imagine someone getting a
postcard with a message blazoned on the back: “Your test results regarding HIV and hepatitis C have come back.
Please give us a call as soon as possible, and make sure you have plenty of bleach in your house!”)
The name “Amerigroup,” as far as I can find on the Internet,
is the administrator in charge of Medicaid in New Jersey. And I am supposedly being signed
up (now, over a several-month period) for Medicaid.
I have nothing in
hand. No Medicaid card. The Amerigroup postcard says, “please make sure you
have your Amerigroup Community Care member ID card with you when you call.”
Well, I have no such ID card, so when I got this postcard
the first time, I was annoyed at it but didn’t respond. That was about
mid-March. The second postcard came April 2. Says exactly the same thing. (And
both cards have the same message in Spanish. Here’s part of my response in
Spanish: “No tengo un ‘Amerigroup
Community Care member ID card.’ Tambien, este situacion es mierda de los gringos. Vay’ al mismisimo Diablo!” [Spanish accent
marks are not included because of what software setup I have])
At first, after getting the second card, I wasn’t going to
call. Heck, I wasn’t originally going to call NJ FamilyCare either. But I
called both on April 2. No answer from NJ FamilyCare (i.e., I got the same response as with the "fourth call" I referred to above), and when I called
Amerigroup….
I seemed to get shunted into a modern-day version of HAL 9000.
A computerized female voice cued me to do certain things. It asked for an ID
number. I put the policy number I’d gotten from the NJ FamilyCare phone service,
months ago. The policy number didn’t work with Amerigroup. Tried again. Didn’t
work. I hung up midway through the call.
Since then, still no ID card has come from FamilyCare. I
could call for a fourth time, or whatever it is. But according to a Star-Ledger report (End note) (in the main
newspaper of New Jersey) of a few weeks ago—and how long it took them to cover
this, when the problems were evident back in January!—the FamilyCare
organization was very much backed up in sending out Medicaid cards. A minority of applications for the
Medicaid expansion program—which in New Jersey was initially handled (in 2013)
via the federal Web site with info channeled over (in initially unusable form)
to the state—had been processed so far.
If I get an ID card by the summer, that will probably be
sufficient. I have no pressing, costly medical needs.
If Amerigroup sends me another postcard like the two I’ve
already gotten, I’ll exclaim, “Caramba!!!”
If I seem kind of blasé about this all, well, I am. I really
am not moved by the ACA drive. Not like I was interested in the Clinton project
of 20 years ago.
And please, 20- and 30-somethings, don’t anyone follow my
lead. I speak for myself on this.
##
End note.
Here is a URL for the article I refer to, which was also in the special health section of the print edition about two weeks ago. If you hit this link, it apparently won't take you to the article, but you go to a generic kind of nj.com page. (Beware of pop-ups--nj.com is BIG on them.) You can search for the article within the nj.com page with its links--it has a plethora of stuff in terms of New Jersey news--but I don't know if you can find it. [Update 5/13/14: The issue of The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's main newspaper, out today has an article starting on its front page about the remaining backlog of Medicaid-extension applications to be processed. Among other things, the article notes there are some 7,000 applicants still awaiting ID cards (I am one, which of course the paper could not have known). The paper also notes the "initial" backlog was due to "unusable data sent to [the state's NJ FamilyCare program, which administers Medicaid here] by the federal government," which was "confirmed" by the secretary of the U.S. department of Health and Human Services in February (p. 1). Actually, I heard on January 6, when I phoned NJ FamilyCare, that it had received info from the federal government (gathered from applications made on the HealthCare.org Web site) that it couldn't use yet. And certainly with the backlog lingering as the winter went on, it's surprising it took the Ledger until *April* to start reporting on the backlog (the April date is reflected in this URL).]
##
End note.
Here is a URL for the article I refer to, which was also in the special health section of the print edition about two weeks ago. If you hit this link, it apparently won't take you to the article, but you go to a generic kind of nj.com page. (Beware of pop-ups--nj.com is BIG on them.) You can search for the article within the nj.com page with its links--it has a plethora of stuff in terms of New Jersey news--but I don't know if you can find it. [Update 5/13/14: The issue of The Star-Ledger, New Jersey's main newspaper, out today has an article starting on its front page about the remaining backlog of Medicaid-extension applications to be processed. Among other things, the article notes there are some 7,000 applicants still awaiting ID cards (I am one, which of course the paper could not have known). The paper also notes the "initial" backlog was due to "unusable data sent to [the state's NJ FamilyCare program, which administers Medicaid here] by the federal government," which was "confirmed" by the secretary of the U.S. department of Health and Human Services in February (p. 1). Actually, I heard on January 6, when I phoned NJ FamilyCare, that it had received info from the federal government (gathered from applications made on the HealthCare.org Web site) that it couldn't use yet. And certainly with the backlog lingering as the winter went on, it's surprising it took the Ledger until *April* to start reporting on the backlog (the April date is reflected in this URL).]
