I originally wrote this in the morning, when I was more
upset about the e-mail I discuss here. Since then, midday, I have made a trip
to the hospital that is part of the complex formerly known as the University of
Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and now is part of the Rutgers University
system. My mother has been there as an inpatient since being operated on two
days ago (I alluded to this development partway into one of my “GWU Days: Alan
L. …” entries posted earlier this week on my other blog). I am less upset by
the e-mail but still not thrilled by it. To go to what I first wrote (updates
are in brackets):
This morning I found an e-mail in my usual e-mail account
(i.e., the one I use the most for communications with others) that was from
(per the sender name line) “The HealthCare.gov Team.” The e-mail included the
copy, “It looks like you submitted an application but did not complete your
enrollment for Marketplace coverage. If you haven't been back to HealthCare.gov
in a while, it's time to change that [sic].
Come back and apply for 2015 coverage *on or after November 15th*.”
I am busy this morning [this said before my trip to the
hospital]. I am in the several-day process of dealing with my mother’s being at
the hospital (the tumor in her chest was successfully removed two days ago; a
full biopsy of it has not been done yet). This entails trips to the hospital, and
phone-calling when needed, amid other minutiae. Basically, as the day goes on,
I have to find out if she’s still in the recovery room, or whether she has been
moved to a private room by now [yes, she has].
I say this to show, first, that I take involvement in the
U.S. health-care system, in all its highly
varied quality, very seriously; and second, I have business on the road I
am attending to, and try to touch all my bases as I can, without getting too
frazzled. As is the case with many of us.
So when I read the start of the e-mail just mentioned, while
working on a library computer, my initial idea was to make an infuriated blog
entry on it. I don’t usually do that. Though some of my blog entries seem to
evince a lot of anger, they generally, per my long practice, are carefully
tooled, with emotion rhetorically modulated as necessary. Even now I am doing
this. For instance, you may not realize that I have held off the impulse to
refer to the ACA or its “Team’s” item of business they sent me as “fucking
shit.” Until now.
It’s news to me that I “did not complete [my] enrollment.” I
don’t know what that means, in the context of reality. I signed up in December
2013, and tried to follow up in the winter, through early spring. Several phone
calls I made to the state office of NJ FamilyCare, an entity handling the
Medicaid-expansion side of the implementation of the ACA in the state, could
not get me information on my account, though I could get a policy number. (I
had to follow a mechanized system, with buttons pushed for options; I never
spoke to an individual to get substantive info.) I gave up trying to call that
office, figuring I would wait and see if that office, which had a horrendous
backlog, would get to my policy in the fullness of time.
By the way, you can see my series tied to the ACA here,
under the tag acronym “OFAD”:
An introductory note is included within here.
##
Given the lack of any response (via mail or otherwise) from
NJ FamilyCare, I had actually been planning, for weeks, to look into my
predicament with some footwork. I was going to go to an office in the county
seat of Newton, N.J., of a nonprofit organization called NORWESCAP, which was
handling ACA business last fall. I wanted to see there what I should do next.
If I had to reapply for Medicaid (via
the federal Web site), I could do that. Meanwhile, if I have to pay $95 on my
federal taxes for tax year 2014, in winter 2015, because the Medicaid
application had not been duly processed by the state in 2014, I am prepared to
do that.
Part of the problem I suspected as to why my application
didn’t go through (I had hypothesized this was at the NJ FamilyCare level) had
to do with the amount of income I put in my application last December, which
was a rough estimate. Actually, by about early September this year, I made only
a little over the estimate. Through now, I am over even that level, but it is
still well below the amount limit for an individual to qualify under the
Medicaid expansion.
When in the midst of my difficult ongoing situation
regarding income, and dealing with my mother’s health issue, it annoys me no
small amount that I get some computer-generated horseshit from “The
HealthCare.gov Team,” especially when for MONTHS I figured that all I needed to
do was wait for the state to get its act together.
If the contention that I had to complete applying means that
I should have responded to the postcard CRAP I got in the mail last spring,
some marketing-like SHIT that I covered in this springtime installment, I believe this can’t be right, because (1) when I called the number and tried
to go through the process by entering what little info I had, which was a
policy number, the system wouldn’t proceed; it was as if I had the wrong account-related
number. (2) Getting those particular
marketing notices in the mail as a suspected key part of the ACA signup seemed
cheesy at best, and a possible fraud at worst.
As I write on this SHIT, it makes me angry, so I’ll stop.
##
That was this morning. Now in the mid-afternoon, I am more
collected about what to do, but I’ve been thinking I will keep careful records
about further ACA business (as I already have), incidentally building a case,
and I will be ready to defend myself lest I need to qualify for (as I recently heard
you could apply for) an exemption from paying the ACA tax penalty in 2015,
and/or presenting an argument to whomever it was relevant or necessary on why I
believe the ACA process I was going through was erratic, if not
fraudulent-seeming, through little or no fault of my own, hence I did not sign
up for Medicaid (and hence I should get X relief…).
I even considered the droll possibility that this ACA
situation constituted a case of tax fraud on the government’s part, in putting
me through hoops that left me disserved partway through, predicated on which
the government could then levy a tax penalty. That is, if in levying the ACA
penalty, the government was saying in effect “You didn’t do what we wanted you
to, hence…,” at which I could retort, “But I did do what I could, and your system turned out to be erratic shit.”
That is, I might not have made a million attempts to iron out the problem (and
why should I have?), but I had done all I could in applying, and it was the
feds and/or the state that had dropped the balls. (But if a tax-fraud complaint
should be filed, I can’t imagine I
would do it, since that isn’t my area of specialty, even as a legal layperson
who does some of his own legal work.)
(This all seems pretty ridiculous. I would never have
expected to deal with this crap when graduating from college 30 years ago.)
