When we reach the ripe old age of 65, the gateway to our “Golden Years”, most of us already know that growing old is not for sissies.
It is not fun. Actually, it really sucks, unless you are lucky enough to have top-notch health.
We have experienced first-hand the profound losses of physical prowess and mental acuity that — when we were thirtyish — seemed things of a distant future that we probably wouldn’t live to worry about.
But one shining beacon of this milestone has attracted us through the many tumultuous years of healthcare changes of the last decades. That beacon has been Medicare, which we have finally earned by living and working for so many years.
Once we made it into the Medicare system, we were led to believe, all of our worries about making expensive decisions for health insurance would become things of the past. We as older Americans would finally get to enjoy the fruits of the world’s most advanced healthcare system, without the pain of monstrous insurance premiums and absurdly high deductibles if we fell ill. It would all be taken care of for us, almost for free, as the promised reward for paying into the system with deductions from every single paycheck for every week since we took our first jobs, so many decades ago. Once we qualified for Medicare, we would have the Gold Standard of the World for medical care.
We scarcely thought about the mechanics of it, generally assuming that sometime around our 65th birthday, we would have to check a box on some government form, sign our name, and that would be that.
Right.
We should have known better. When else, in our long years of personal experience, has anything remotely having to do with the government proceeded smoothly? Or been simple?
Easy? Not so much.
As we quickly come to learn, that which should be the simplest health decision of our lives is in fact the most complicated, by far. There is no such thing as saying simply, “yes, I want Medicare”.
Instead, the questions start with: Do you want Part A only, or would you like Part B with your Part A? Would you like to upsize that order with Part D? Would you like to add Plan A to that? How about Plan B? Or C? F? Perhaps G? Maybe Plan N is more to your taste? Or would you rather skip all the side dishes and go with Part C, and make that a la mode with the MAPD flavor?
What?!
We expect simple. Instead, we are confronted by a whole required curriculum just to get a grip on what we face.
