URGENT: Single Payer Day – UHC and Single Payer – Today is the day, folks

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Woke up to an e-mail from change.org. A petition request to protest UHC. United Health Care for those who have not had the misfortune to cross paths with them. They asked for a personal comment and here is mine:

It’s no coincidence that your e-mail arrived in my inbox this morning. It is raining today and I’ a small-plot organic farmer so I have some inside time today. This Tue morn is dedicated to doing battle with UHC and the idiots who make its policies.

Those policies are designed to cheat the members who pay big money for their premiums. We get our UHC through my wife’s employment at Home Depot. I am disabled and we get by on her $22k a year but mostly we need that job just for the health insurance.

UHC are masters at mis-billing, avoidance of contract fulfillment and general outright fraud. I have friends who are doctors and their side of the story is even worse than mine as a poor patient.

I will lose an otherwise productive inside day spending it on the phone, delving the depths of incomprehensible automated telephone voice mail menus, only to find myself at the wrong department.

If by some stroke of luck I find a human being, I may be transferred to the right department – and disconnected while waiting five minutes on hold. Then I will start all over again until I get through.

Some of today’s issues are interesting. My wife took family leave to tend to her dying mother last year. We paid all of our co-pays on time. But somehow I disappeared from the rolls for about two weeks during the transition back to full-time post-maternal-death. Instead of being charged $50 – $15- co-pays, I am being charged in the hundreds for procedures that should have been covered.

Your prayers for my patience are appreciated. The problem is not the underpaid, overworked employee on the other end of the phone who bears the brunt of the collective anger. Pray for them. They are ou. The problem is in the executive and upper managerial suites, the board, and the Street. All compensation flows to the top these days. All these greed-heads want is to make their quarterly numbers thereby triggering their bonuses. All else means nothing.

These people have no humanity. They are lying, extorting and bribing their asses off today to kill single payer health care. Please join in, call your congressman and help get this done right. It is NOW or NEVER on health care reform. Our time has come. Shame on us if we let it slip by.

God bless you all.

I have bills going back to 2006 with Cigna – another of the wonder providers – that need to be resolved. Cigna will tell me today that the claim is now too old. They will be fucking with the wrong guy on the wrong day. I still have seeds to plant and a garden to tend – rain or not. I’m going to open up a bit about myself so that you can better understand the CIgna case. It’s a cute one.

I left Lotus/IBM on Mar 31, 2003 in a BBR state. I had been Director of Global Engineering with one office in Cambridge, MA and one in Singapore. My original boss was from Tokyo and one of the finest human beings I have ever met. We travelled the planet relentlessly – Tokyo, Yokohama, Seoul, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Phuket, Amsterdam, and a lot of Dublin. It was a workaholics dream. I could do 80 – 100 hour weeks from anywhee on the planet. Unfortunately that stuff catches up to you. In five years I was on medication for stress, anxiety attacks and depression – plus I was self-medicating with two bottles of fine chardonnay eevery night.

We had a re-org, my VP (another awesome guy to work for) moved up and my Tokyo manager, Ryo, didn’t get the VP slot. The GM in Dublin did. They were not close to put it mildly. The way my group worked was to translate and re-engineer the US code overnight so that it could handle 23 different languages. My funding came as 15% of the US team’s overall budget. I had six projetcs going on simultaneaously world-wide. The manager in Dublin was mis-appropriating my allocation and putting it all on to another bigger project. She would only communicate with me over my home phone line and even then ask if I was recording the conversation. I had to tell the senior dev and dev managers who worked for me to tell their US counterparts nothing until Elaine from Dublin “had her story” together to cover her ass with Combridge and Somers. To me, not telling a known truth is the same as purposely lying. This ate me up. In Aug ’02 I could see the ’03 budget without me in it. So I refinanced the house, cut my debt load and started finding new homes in the company for my people world-wide. On Mar 31 I was out of there like a man from a cannon, buyout in hand.

Unfortunately the man in the cannon took a few years to decompress. I was changing my anti-depressant in Jan-Feb ’02 and keeping BM LEAP and my manager and HR manager informed. They didn;’ give a shit. They just wanted me out. Soas it happened the two bottle a day became 2.5 to 3 and I was over my head in my Irish gene pool. One morning I woke up, took some diovan, jumped out of bed too suickly, lost consciousness and came down on my left shoulder. Broke it in four pieces, so it was off to the local hospital and the joys of Cigna.

Turns out it was a combo of the Diovanand a BAL of 0.21 that led to my fall. My PCP put me into the hospital for care for the shoulder and a five day alcohol detox. Cigna gets the bill – well over $5000. Well says Medical Cigna, this is obviously Behavioral Cigna. Let’s put this on their dime. Behavioral Cigna says WTF and punts the bill back to Medical. At this point the bill goes below the radar. Meanwhile, I’m up in Kent, Ct at High Watch farm getting well on the alcohol problem. I spend a month as a patient and tehn six months as a volunteer member-of-staff, doing maintenance, dishes, kitchen and whatever they need. It was a seven month spiritual retreat for me and has only grown within me since.

Back in Cigna land, they claim they are forwarding bills to me in CT. Maybe they were. I wasn’t seeing them and even if I did, that first year of recovery has you dealing with scrabled eggs betwixt the ears. My IQ is normally well north of 150 and is back there again.

Today, in the Tue rain of Plymouth, gently falling on my farmer;s market garden, I will devote a day to fihting UHC and Cigna. And if they want to get nasty, I’m covered doubly under the ADA act due to my depression and liquid substance abuse. They are about to go through the corn-picker. And I don’t mind going with them. I have been to a place worse than hell and these poor people will end up honoring their obligations come hell or high water.

Thanks for listening to my rant. It fely cathartic to unload to my fellow Dharmanians. I am now ready to cal my CC Bill Delahunt, Teddy and John Kerry, and anyone else I can find. maybe even the committee chairs and members. As Howard Beale famously said in Paddy chayevsky’s masterpiece, Network: “I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”

Your prayers and support as I do battle today will be appreciated. I am just one of millions who are having far worse experiences with our health care system than I am. People are dying needlessly every day. Preventive care is a joke. A rat’s nest of multiple billing code allows massive scale fraud at Medicare and Medicaid. The big insurance companies and big Pharma want their money machine intact at the expense of our lives.

Our time has come to seize the reins of this runaway disaster. We have a window until the next recess; after that the 2010 election cycle begins. Call and write your congressman today, LTEs, anything you can do. Just don’t sit there and do nothing but complain. The children of our nation, our future deserve better. This can be the legacy of our generation to them. For the love of God, please do what you can today.

A blessing on all of you.

Shanti.