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Edited on Mon Jun-20-11 11:01 AM by demodonkey
Since my father's death in the early 1990s, my mother and I live together, and share our finances and ownership of our home. Until his death in 2007 my disabled adult brother lived with us also.
My mother has Medicare and an extremely good medicare supplemental insurance that even covers some skilled nursing time after a hospital stay.
Without going into the long and sordid details, let me tell you that in late 2008 I was forced by a greedy and incompetent "nonprofit" hospital to apply for Medical Assistance (Medicaid) for my mother, to try to get her temporarily into a skilled nursing facility (admission should have been covered by her Medicare and supplemental insurance but please believe me in order to get her out of this hospital I was very much forced to apply for Medicaid.)
The medical assistance process was hideously invasive. The caseworker demanded to see every single scrap of financial paper for our entire household for the last 5 years. (This thanks to GW Bush's Deficit Reduction Act.) By every scrap of paper, I mean every receipt for every tank of gas, every bag of groceries, even every cup of coffee anyone in my family ever bought. I was asked to look at bills from years before and identify who they were "for." Any money from our household funds that was spent on me (even my own money), or on my then-deceased disabled brother, or if I couldn't remember the transaction, that amount was counted as a "gift" my mother had made and counted toward making her ineligible for medical assistance for a time.
My family's financial choices and living arrangements, and my own life choices were probed and questioned. The Welfare Department implied that we were remiss in not saving every single receipt (no matter how small) and every scrap of financial paper -- along with notes as to how every penny in the household was spent.
After these sessions at the Department of Welfare, I felt so horribly violated I would come home and take a shower.
In the end my mother got no further therapy and no help from anyone but me; she eventually checked herself out of this hospital against medical advice and came home where she and I have lived happily for the past two and a half years since this horrible episode (except for further legal issues initiated by this hospital in which our finances have been further probed and threatened.)
If you are unlucky enough to get sick or become disabled, there are forces in our so-called health"care" system that are out to grab everything you and maybe even your family owns, if they can get their hands on it. Even if you have "good" insurance; insurance can't pay if it is never billed. I have come to realize that in the event you get into one of these healthcare messes, every financial paper, every insurance report, and every doctor's "bill" (even if it says "this is not a bill") has to be saved -- assuming the (so-called) healthcare provider ever actually sends you a bill instead of simply taking you to collections or court first and asks questions later.
The upshot of this is that I am now afraid to throw anything away, not even the smallest receipt for anything. If one gets lost or unreadable, I worry, not to mention that I am not a professional file clerk and it is hard to keep order in this mess of receipts, papers, and mail. I am no hoarder, but due to the mass of paperwork parts of our home are starting to look like one lives here.
Good luck.
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