Help !! I am drowning in overwhelming medical debt. I can't even find level freaking ground much less a ladder to get out of this mess. I hate being in debt. I am a normal guy and I try and pay my bills. Sometimes I have to play the which bills get paid game. The check just doesn't stretch far enough to cover everyone but eventually they all get paid, at least until I started to get these medical bills.
Just over five years ago I started having trouble with my back. It kind of came out of nowhere. Sure I had back surgery ages ago and sometimes I had a bit of an ache in my back but that was normal. This wasn't. I couldn't get out of bed it hurt so bad. Thankfully I had decent insurance. A nice 90/10 policy provided by my job. Still I had to hit that $1200.00 deductible. I had a few appointments with the neurosurgeon and of course some CT scans and then an MRI. Bye Bye to the deductible but I still had to pay it. Well thank goodness I had an FSA account. I was able to keep up with the bills. Then I still had to pay my 10%. Doesn't sound like a lot does it ? It's just 10 bucks for every 100 dollars but those add up quick when you are seeing multiple doctors and then get referred to pain management. But stop, there is more to it. Here comes the end of the year and guess what, that pesky deductible is back. Another 1200.00 bucks to pay out before I hit that magic number and it drops to 10% again. Didn't I just do this ? This sucks. How the hell am I going to pay for my medications ? Back to that wonderful FSA. Good thing I funded it above the $1200.00 deductible limit. That took about 40 bucks from every paycheck. So I am still treading water and keeping up just barely.
Now it is time for the surgeon. More CT scans, More MRIs and other tests. Bye Bye deductible but even with the FSA which is now drained I can't keep up with the bills. So what can I do ? I pay what I have to pay of course. I pay the orthopedic surgeon, he is the guy who will be slicing me open. Got to keep him happy. So it goes on. Then juust before the day of surgery I find out I am close to that magical number. MOOP. It stands for Maximum Out Of Pocket and means after that am free and clear. Insurance pays it all. So off we go to surgery. I spent 9 1/2 hours on the table getting my spine worked on. Couldn't believe it when I came out of it. Sure felt like someone had been crushing my chest and my back was in agony. Thank God for the morphine drip or whatever it was. Every six minutes I could hit that magic button and get relief. I kept hitting it even when the pain was not there. I didn't want it to come back.
So I get home and the bills start to roll in. Dang it my surgeon got his in under the wire so now I have to pay him for sure but where the hell is the money going to come from ? I am on short term disability from work, two thirds of my normal pay. That hurts so we cut back on stuff like food. The FSA was drained and no help. Thankfully we had hit MOOP so no new bills but dang it trying to cover $300.00 odd bucks with only 2/3 of my pay was a pain.
Then came the real fun. I was back at work and we had hit the end of the year again so I was back to trying to kill the deductible. Thankfully once again the FSA was nice and full. More medical bills were coming in. I was still having issues with my back. I missed work. Wound up missing too much work because they fired me. Jerk wads. Didn't matter a freaking bit I had put in 6 years with them. Didn't matter that the only reason I hit that number of misses was because they refused to work with me and my doctor, denying the reasonable requests he had advocated for. They finally agreed to let me miss 2 days a month but the writing was on the wall I had one absence left before they could fire me. So they pulled a sneaky one. I called out and they wrote me up for it. I told them I wanted my day back since one of the days they wrote me up for was one of my excused days. Nope didn't get it back and they left it in the write up as well so bye bye job. They fought me for unemployment too the bastards. I won but it was 3 months with no income at all. Got my back pay from unemployment and paid almost all of it Cobra to keep my insurance.
Jump on down below that orange jungle gym, and we can see what happens next.
I finally found a new job but it was as a temp so I continued to pay out $500.00 a month for Cobra coverage. Hell I had to. No choice. I spent more than that a month in medications but here is the sneaky part. See I had my deductible all over again. I had almost hit MOOP for that year when I was fired but now I had to hit the deductible again and the bills started to mount. Hell what could I do ? I was paying out Cobra and didn't have much left over. Finally relief in sight ! Time to celebrate AI got hired full time at my job. I was eligible for insurance right away so I signed up. I picked the 90/10 policy and was even able to add my wife for a heck of a lot less than Cobra was charging. So now we had coverage again and I had a new FSA. Oops I forgot now that I had a family policy the deductible wasn't $1200.00 it was 2500.00. Dang it I knew it was too good to be true. So more bills coming in.
I was doing great until this past year. Well I can't say it was great but at least I could keep my head above water. Now however the bills really rolled in. I was getting a set of pain shots at pain management. That was a huge bill. I put $600.00 down on it. Hey I tried to keep pain management under $100.00 That $600.00 didn't even make a dent in it really. I still owed over $800.00 and now the FSA was out of cash. That went quick when you are using it to pay for your medications as well as the doctor bills and they tricked me at work. That $2500.00 deductible wasn't all of it. I had a separate deductible of $1000.00 for drugs. So it was $3500.00 not $2500.00 like I had planned. Drug costs were completely separate. Dang it does everyone want a part of me ? Where the hell can I get more money. Of course everything went up but my pay. I had to pay out for everything. The wife was out of work and had been for a bit so no help there. ( She has done everything possible to find work including going back to college to improve her skills and be a better fit for employers. Didn't help. She ran into that little bias against the long term unemployed. )
Where was the money going to come from ? I could rob a bank but that would just lead to me in jail and the bills still not paid. Meanwhile thanks to legislation I had to keep racking up more bills with pain management so I could keep getting my meds filled. The check sure wouldn't stretch any further and we had already cut back on food just to keep paying PM as much as we could. So what the hell did I do wrong ? How the hell can this happen ? The ACA was supposed to help people not drown under huge medical debt. I had good insurance. We sure don't live an extravagant lifestyle. It has been 8 years since I last had a haircut at a barber. The wife has gone just as long. I have to say I am pretty good with the clippers and so is she. We haven't had a vacation in over 8 years. Our car is falling apart. It is now 12 years old and I keep it running with repairs only done when it is impossible to not do them. Thanks to just my income we don't qualify for food stamps or other government assistance. Thankfully we have no kids of the two legged variety but we do have 2 of the four legged furry variety. Too bad I can't write them off on my taxes. We have not been eating expensive food. Our last celebration when she finally got a job was a $12.00 Papa Murphy pizza. It was on sale and we ate the leftovers for lunch. I have to say between us we are pretty good at making our nickles squeak when we finally spend them. We shop at 3 different grocery stores, all within 5 miles of the house to get the best deals and most of it is spent at Aldi. They are great and a heck of a lot cheaper than Kroger or Walmart for most things. We eat a lot of leftovers for lunches and even dinner to stretch our food budget further. The good news is PM is still letting me come in for office visits while I try and pay down my bill. I have killed the deductible but still have a ton of medical bills demanding my attention. The hospital I like to use is about to shut me off for anything but ER visits. I owe them a few thousand. I still owe my surgeon about $300.00 maybe I will be able to pay him out of my next bonus if I get one. I am hoping the water heater at 12 years old will hang in there for a another year or so, same for the washer and dryer, stove and fridge. Though that is a bit newer since the old one crapped out a couple of years ago and we had to replace it. The dishwasher has been dead for 3 years now and no hope of replacing it. The bed is in definite need of being replaced. There is a huge dip on both sides where we sleep. The so called "Pillowtop" has become squashed. Then again it is almost 9 years old too. We have 2 TVs a 8 year old flat screen and a 13 year old boxy 32 inch that weighs close to 200 pounds. Heck we sold the couch to get money to pay a medical bill so we don't even have any furniture in our so called living room.
I am hoping this gets better but I tell you that having insurance is sure no guarantee of not going broke paying for medical care. Maybe I don't deserve medical care since I am poor. That seems to be the message of the republicans. I can't figure out how to make the paycheck stretch any further and if something breaks like the car or the water heater we are totally screwed. Maybe I could hit the lottery. That sure would help. I tell you one of the first things I would do is pay all of my bills then I would find at least 5 people who have a bunch of medical bills and pay them off for them. I know I can't be the only one drowning under this type of crap.
We really need to get with the rest of the industrialized world and institute some form of single payer system. We pay way more for healthcare than other countries per capita. We also get a heck of a lot less for our money. Too bad Republicans want to kill the ACA and will not even entertain single payer. Hell those jerks want to kill Medicare as it stands already. I guess they want to see people dropping dead in the streets. That is the only answer that makes sense to me as to why they oppose anything to help the little guy. Maybe their vision for us is that we all go back to the days when employers basically were able to treat employees like slaves. If someone dropped dead on the line no big deal just drag someone off the street to replace them. Pay them crap wages and then make sure you steal even that meager bit back from them because hey profit is profit no matter who you screw to get it. Don't worry we promise to take care of you if you get too sick or too old to work. That's what they say but the way they will take care of you is to drag you out back and shoot you. That bullet is much cheaper than having a non worker dragging down the system. I wouldn't be surprised to see some republican trying to pass that legislation making it legal for companies to kill those too old or sick to work. Sure beats having to pay into Worker's comp funds and Social Security. Heck a bullet costs less than 2 bucks and I am sure they would come up with an even cheaper system just to save that 2 bucks after all that 2 bucks add up over time.
Well that's my rant. Have to save up my energy to drag my butt to work tomorrow so I can keep my insurance and keep paying my medicals little by little. I figure at this rate I might be out from under by the time I hit 85, just in time to retire if Republicans let me.