Guys don’t seem to be called
“Lefty” anymore.
—George Carlin, in Napalm & Silly Putty (New York:
Hyperion, 2001) (this is the sort of name my title refers to; I am not saying
“Lefty” to make any insinuation about Obamacare being “leftist”; i.e., I figuratively
mean Lefty as in a local shady operator like, as suppositional examples, Louie the
Lip or Joey Ding-Dong)
Subsections below:
I. Wonders never
cease: Getting answers on my ACA “oblivion” situation
II. Connecting with
Lefty, so to speak
III. Maybe it ain’t
over till the jackass-automaton Marketplace e-mailing genie sings further
[Edit 11/19/14. Edit 11/20/14.]
Some of this was written before the climactic mid-November stuff
recounted below, and the rest is written before I have my Medicaid card in
hand, so I’m hoping things pan out completely, so this story won’t be for
naught.
Some of this experience involved trooping around “like a lay
social worker” fairly similarly to how I’d done for others back in my VISTA
days (1986-87) and, much later, amid busy help-to-others in a support-group
milieu from about July 2001 to, say, 2006. Except now it was just for me, when
the Great Leap Forward of the Affordable Care Act ostensibly seemed to be
another big, beneficent, civic-oriented helping hand extended magnanimously by
Washington but ended up seeming—because of the federal level’s occasional
rattletrap nature (combined with state inadequacy)—to require local yokels to
scrape around desultorily for (figuratively speaking) box-tops, rubber bands,
and old lottery tickets in Palookaville.
By the way, in criticizing it, I don’t expect to be
considered along the cartoonish, black-and-white lines by which pro- and
anti-ACA thinking has been cast. For instance, I agree with those who dismiss
the Republicans as having no improved (or any) alternative to the ACA. And
personally I feel the Republican idea that, to get health insurance, all people
need to do is get jobs is almost criminally wrong (as to facts and otherwise).
But, even after having voted mainly Democratic for about 34 years, I would not cheerily
wave the flags for the ACA, given all its many flaws, big and small. This after
I was among those in the 1990s who was supportive in some sense of the Clinton
attempt at such a program.
This narrative may seem to be a bit detailed, but it shows
the hoops you have to go through, which I feel after all I’ve been through in
my life comprise a fairly big impertinence. And I went through this without
really being enthusiastic about doing so, and I also spare you the curse words
and such that might have peppered this “walk through a shadowy land.”
I. Wonders never
cease: Getting answers on my ACA “oblivion” situation
So I finally went out to the office in Sussex County, N.J.,
of NORWESCAP, which I had first heard about at a distance, completely new to it
and wonder-minded at age ~25, in very late 1986 or early 1987, when I was
working in VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America, since ~1994 part of
AmeriCorps; my stint was at a location in Somerset County, N.J.). This (in
2014) was where I thought I’d get answers on why—if I’d signed up via the
federal “Marketplace” Web site in late 2013, and had gotten info on having an
assigned policy number in winter 2014—I still had no Medicaid card by this
month (November 2014) and had been informed via impersonal e-mail by the “Team”
at the federal Marketplace that I had not finished signing up, etc.
(By the way, I had long ruled out phoning NJ FamilyCare
again. After three tries in the winter, with just an inadequate mechanized
response, and knowing they’d been overwhelmed with Medicaid-extension
processing in the winter anyway, why expect to get anywhere lately with them?)
I’d heard (in a local newspaper, I think), probably in fall
2013, that in this county NORWESCAP was handling the administrative task of
helping people get signed up for ACA insurance; NORWESCAP is a sort of
charitable organization, mainly meant for low-income people in several counties
in the state. I’d thought I would contact it (stop by, if I could) shortly
after Election Day (as a matter of practical realities and slight lack of
enthusiasm about this whole ACA “project”) and before the start of the new
signup period, which I’d heard was to kick off about November 15 (which, of
course, it has).
Also, it was to follow the fairly unitary-and-exclusive
(emotionally and practically) period of hospital care for my mother, which
ended in late October. She had a tumor successfully removed, in a
same-day-surgery sort of situation (which resulted in a few days of inpatient
stay for her). The tumor was a sarcoma (the third such she’s had; the first in
2001-02 and 2011), for those who’ve followed this thread in my stories. The doctors
seem to see no reason to feel there are any malignant remainders of the tumor
in her, though apparently she is going to have her periodic scans more
frequently again.
On November 6, I was out in the county seat of Newton to
renew my driver’s license. I wasn’t sanguine about how well that would go (I
think, at age almost-53, I seem to have virtually lost all faith in government
doing the simplest things), but it went much better than I’d expected. I felt
that, once that was done, the rest of the day should be “mundane chores that I
would semi-fondly embrace.”
It took some work to locate the NORWESCAP office. There was
a lot of footwork, but I guess you could say I was determined. Slogging along
with umbrella, I checked at the county administration building. Got a phone
number there from some helpful-enough women in the County Clerk’s office, and
some vague info on possible address. There was a reference by the women to NORWESCAP’s
office being near the main library building. That place I knew well, having gone there a lot in years past. I
went out to the library on this rainy day. I got in (construction there made
for an awkward new temporary entrance), and finally got info from a helpful library
reference-department worker on NORWESCAP’s address.
(You may wonder, why didn’t I look this up on the Web
myself? I basically felt I’d locate NORWESCAP readily enough “on foot” as part
of my going to Newton for my license renewal. [To kill two birds with one
stone, in part.] Plus, I had a foggy memory of NORWESCAP having been in a
building near the center of Newton that I used to stop at 12 or 14 years ago.
In the old days, I used to tramp around to different social-service places in
Newton [by car and/or on foot] when I was more up to my neck in the
support-group jazz [through roughly 2006], and in those days I did a lot of
literal footwork by preference. Almost as a practical echo, I felt doing my
business in Newton this month on foot wasn’t too bad an idea. As it turned out,
the address for NORWESCAP I got, on Halsey Road [in Frankford or Hampton
township], could have been gotten online [assuming the Google info wasn’t
outdated, which sometimes happens].)
Then I had a heck of a time finding the building they were
in. I had a number for the street address, but the building—which also housed a
business—was surprisingly hard to find. Once there, I found you had to ring a
buzzer at NORWESCAP, and wait for an answer—you couldn’t just walk in.
Now the (to me) humor-appropriate stuff started. This was
like ringing at a speakeasy. I stated my business and was buzzed in. A helpful
woman talked to me; I gave her my “quick brief”—“I signed up last year, nothing
in the mail, got a policy number, called NJ FamilyCare,” etc. (you might know
the saga from my past OFAD entries), and she seemed to answer as if she’d heard
roughly the same from others before. She was efficient in giving me terse info,
including a flier giving info on whom to phone in Denville, N.J. (in Morris
County; the actual location would appear to be different), who would be my next
best bet.
(She said her office here handled just family
something-or-other. She also made some reference to X program for people 55 and
over, though she didn’t give me the relevant flier, as [she said] it was
outdated. I guess I looked 55 or older. I certainly had looked like walking
death when my new driver’s license photo was first taken.)
I said thanks, and was ready to go.
This was like getting a tip like, in growly voice, “Call dis
number, ask for Lefty. He’ll hook you up wid your connection.” I mean, the
woman was nice, but how rickety a system, in its national and local branches,
this suggested for delivering nationally mandated health insurance. Not that
the NORWESCAP people weren’t (in their locally responsible way) earnest in
providing what they could.
Now, as it would turn out, there was more gritty tracking
down of the right person, and getting the problem ironed out, for me to do.
II. Connecting with
Lefty, so to speak
I called the number I was given, on a Friday, somewhat late
in the day, November 7 (at some point I found the relevant NORWESCAP office was
in Rockaway Township, N.J.), and I left a detailed-enough message. The next day
(Saturday, November 8) I sent an e-mail after I’d looked up the NORWESCAP
entity online, saw several addresses, and found that you could e-mail a message
to the office of your choice. (I didn’t realize NORWESCAP had started as a
poverty-addressing arm of Johnson’s Great Society program. The Great Society had
long been, at least vaguely, a sort of solid-metes-and-bounds of U.S.
government standard for me, though it has become as faded and decayed as a morning’s
dream you can barely remember.) I composed a succinct-yet-thorough-enough
e-mail and sent it.
On Monday, November 10, I found there was a phone message,
left on one of my numbers, by the person who had received and/or chosen to
answer the e-mail. She gave useful info. I transferred this to audiotape to
listen to it again.
On Tuesday, November 11, I called the number that it seemed
I should first call, but I got a lot of ringing, no answer. Sensibly, one could
conclude the office was closed for Veterans Day, but I didn’t know for sure if
I was calling a state office or not. (Turned out, I was.)
On the morning of Wednesday, November 12, I called the
number again, and now I got a live person, no mechanized system. (I would find,
only for sure via a piece of mail I received within days, that this was a
Medicaid office in Paterson. Not only had it not occurred to me to try, out of
the blue and instead of NORWESCAP, to call the state Medicaid office directly,
but I didn’t even know there was one in Paterson.)
I explained my situation: I’d applied on the federal Web
site, had gotten nothing (in the mail…), and had found I had a policy number
but got nothing else over months, etc.
I found from this person (she seemed to read rather perfunctorily,
almost to herself, from what she found on her computer) that my policy had been
effective X date last winter, and a card was mailed out to my street address
(on Y date).
I never received it, I told her. (I probably explained that
my street address could not be used to mail things.)
In fact, not that I would have explained this in detail to
her, HERE (in the ACA techno-doings regarding what address they used) WAS ONE
BIG SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM OF WHY I NEVER GOT MY CARD. And I will explain
something here that may sound like grumbling about another weird set of ways of
my household for decades, but here really isn’t meant to be.
(Sidebar—note on how I do a
“slalom run” in talking about family issues. You see, I hold off on
giving the full set of stories on
household jazz that, variously in my practical life, throws me for a loop, in
big ways and small, as much as I might seem [to you] to spill an awful lot of
beans on my blogs. The way my family is, I still very discreetly hold off on
telling some things and speaking about others. This may seem arbitrary to
outsiders, and even does a bit to me at times, but I think it follows in a very
good-faith manner [or as good-faith a “policy” as is possible under the
circumstances] how I talk about family stuff, which latter is relevant enough
to me as a writer [going back to the 1980s] but reaches points where “holds” on
releasing info should be observed, for reasons I either explicitly offer or
not.)
My household has not had a street address for mail, ever. We
have had the same P.O. box since 1965 or 1966, even before there were (as a
matter of instituted infrastructure here) any street boxes in the neighborhood
(which started about the early 1970s). My mother has long stayed with the P.O.
box, staunchly refusing to have a street box (even after numerous homes on our
street, and throughout the local community of Barry Lakes, have had street
boxes for years), for reasons I won’t go into now. This has led, over many
years, to (before the Patriot Act) various people (in situations where their
requiring address info is at play, when you fill out forms, or whatever) being
surprised that we only have a P.O. box, and we say please use that, otherwise
our mail can’t be delivered….
Post–Patriot Act, there have been more occasional rigorous
demands from various entities for a street address along with a P.O. box, or
else (either as might be more or less advised by those seeking the info, or as
could be bemusedly suspected by us) we’d be suspected of conducting fraud or
terrorism, etc. So we have new dances to do (I may be more adept at this than
my mother, who is of course tooled to older conventions, etc.) in terms of
supplying addresses so that if anything is to be mailed to us, it is sent to
the P.O. box, even if this means filling out blanks (which doesn’t always work,
e.g., technically on computers) with the street address and the P.O. box
together.
Tedious? Well, a fact of my life.
(My mother’s refusal to have a
street box, as is so often the nature of her “ways,” has both an objective, sensible
component and a subjective, less-than-reasonable component. One of her
longstanding rationales was that punk kids could steal from and/or do damage to
the mailbox, and this as a broad matter was far more likely and relevant a
concern in the 1970s, and has very rarely happened in decades since. But
wouldn’t you know? In the way that if you harbor fears long enough, eventually
your fear will have some basis [though I don’t think she focused on it this
way], as recently as March 2011 there was a crazy situation where a kid living
on our street had no fewer than five college-kid beer-and-drugs parties in one
week, each on a different night, and on one night, there was a rampage of boys
on the street where a neighbor’s mailbox was damaged, and a partier’s car had
its mirrors smashed off and the driver was chased across several lots and in a
panic away from the area. My mother, awoken from sleep, called the police, not
fully cognizant of all the facts of this mayhem at the time. We haven’t seen
that kind of punkish insanity in this neighborhood since the 1970s. Fortunately,
the household from which it emanated hasn’t hosted that kind of stuff since.
Let me add, this mailing-address
thing isn’t the worst disservice [summarily speaking] that my mother’s
“preferences” have done me; there are other, far more troubling examples, which
I decisively hold off on telling in my blogs. By the way, a recently released
memoir by Brooke Shields, on which I saw something of a review in the November
18 Star-Ledger, is interesting,
showing in a way that people are ready enough to accept when it comes from a
star, and otherwise is a foreign country most people don’t know about or try to
understand: when you as a child are [as one type of problem] “codependent” with
a parent [not exactly the case of me with my mother, but more Shields’ case],
or operate in a “parentified role” [more my case], you actually are always
inhabiting two different roles, with
their own spheres of moral guidelines and emotional concerns, and the
disjunction of which spheres provides sources for deep conflict: one that
is more ordinarily defined with respect to your parent [where, due to problems
apart from the two-role situation, you may be oppressed or abused in some way];
and one outside your parent’s sphere of business and concerns, and “looking
in,” which is more morally grounded but also is troubling for putting you, the
child, at odds in key ways with the parent.)
##
And I found from a printout in my ACA files from when I
first applied on the ACA Web site that they did
have my P.O. box address—in fact, it was the only address that showed on the
printout. But bless the “system’s” heart, between my applying and the feds
getting the federal Marketplace-inserted info to the state to be processed
there, somehow things got handled so that the mailing address used for the
Medicaid card was the street address. And apparently the card was mailed out
and returned to sender. And then ended up in Oblivion.
Well, the woman I talked with on November 12 was very
helpful—she was (as I said) in a Medicaid office in Paterson. She first had to
check with someone else if they could change the address per my request on the
phone, or per whatever concern…and yes, they could. I should call back in 48
hours to confirm the change was made. Then I would get everything mailed to me.
I had a set of notes from various things the woman told me,
a somewhat initially-incoherent-to-me jumble of stuff she mostly
programmatically issued, and I sorted it out later, because there were two additional
(and toll-free) numbers I had to call.
On Thursday, November 13, I got a mailing from the Paterson
Medicaid office of just a single photocopied sheet basically outlining the type
of benefits I would be entitled to. It was better than nothing, but only
slightly. (It said I had to get most forms of health care from a certain HMO
that was set up for Medicaid recipients in the area. This wasn’t entirely
pleasing.)
Then on Friday, November 14, two days after the key
Wednesday call, I phoned the number I first called, again. Yes, my address was
changed. Now…I found that I should call only one of the two toll-free numbers
I’d been given on Wednesday. This I did, and I went through whatever minor
hoops I had to there, and was told my stuff would come in the mail in seven to
ten business days. (Which I later found could be as late as early December.)
Well, this was something of a relief. I would have my
Medicaid card almost a full year after I had first started applying. I wouldn’t
have to go on the federal Marketplace site again (though I keep getting e-mails
from the Team, as if they still “feel” I have to continue with an application
that wasn’t finished last year).
I relate all this, not feeling it’s the worst anyone ever
experienced with this ACA signup, and knowing there are many, many stories that
are worse. But for what it’s worth, I feel a little more confidence in the
system. But let’s just say that, if the ACA people were looking for a
rank-and-file consumer to do cheerleading for the system, I would not be their first choice.
III. Maybe it ain’t
over till the jackass-automaton Marketplace e-mailing genie sings further
On Tuesday, November 18, I opted—not with full confidence—to
act on one of the many Marketplace e-mails I’ve gotten from the Team on the
federal level, and reset my password for the federal site (though, except for
maybe something routine I might be required to do, I don’t foresee any business
with it, now that I seem to be signed up for Medicaid, while the Team keeps
sending me e-mails as if I still have to sign up).
I ran into problems pretty early—when in the process of
resetting my password, there were three questions related to my past personal
life that I had to answer to clarify I was who I was. Well, I thought I had the answers to, but one
answer turned out to be wrong. (Factually, I didn’t know why at first, then
[after looking in my paper records] I found out: one of the questions concerned
my “boss” from my first job. I had spelled his name wrong this time; in the
original application, it was right. Both spellings have five letters and should
be pronounced the same. So I had the name, not the right spelling.)
I tried to go through the process again, and starting
encountering more problems. I did not get an e-mail, as I got when first
being required to reset my password. I started getting infuriated similar to
when I was deeply angered by the ACA e-mail implications several weeks ago, as
shown in my entry OFAD #6. I figure,
rather than curse the “whole shidden mess” out in the toughest possible terms,
time to take a break.
I will keep you posted if there are more weird developments.
