is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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health and wealth.
Have you ever heard of this? Doctors who don't take insurance at all? They just make you pay them an outlandish price and then it's up to you to submit a claim to your insurance company. And then your insurance company will inevitably call the claim outlandish and only pay back part of it?
I hear that this is how lots of psychiatrists/analysts work--and that makes sense since a lot of those visits aren't covered by insurance in general. And of course I'm aware that people use doctors who don't accept their insurance--I've done that plenty of times. But what I hadn't heard of was a whole league of doctors who don't take any insurance at all.
Last year when I was trying to figure out what Lady Doctor to see (I'm talking about gynecology here, not the gender of the doctor), I asked around so I wouldn't end up with a loser. Everyone who was recommended to me was the no-insurance type. So I decided to try to be financially wise and go with a doctor who did take my insurance. I had a hard time finding one who was still accepting new patients. I finally did. And, man, what a loser she was. I am only slightly joking when I say that I believe that anyone who reads this blog knows more about my medical history than that doctor. I told her the pertinent facts and she didn't order any tests or anything, or ask whether I'd ever had any tests done. Instead she stared at me as if she were a Zombie. She performed an exam without saying anything. Then I asked her for her thoughts on my situation. She angrily wrote out some orders for blood tests. I didn't notice until a week later that she hadn't even mentioned a mammogram though I am clearly of the age of women who are supposed to get mammograms. I called the office to have them send me a referral for a mammogram. And then I called them again to remind them. And so on. A total loser.
So this year, tomorrow, I am going to a doctor who takes no insurance. I will pay her a huge fee. And then I will get a tiny bit of it back. It is sad. But it is smarter than the other route, it seems to me, in the long run.
In other news, I got an eye test today. I thought I was getting an eye EXAM but it was really just a very very cursory check to see what my eyeglass prescription is. Waste of time. I guess I'll have to make an appointment with an actual eye doctor when I get back to NYC in January. However there is some good news attached to my cursory eye test. Even though the "vision plan" I was using doesn't provide a full eye exam, it does pay for the eye test and glasses up to a certain value with no cash out of pocket at all.
In my heart of hearts I really wanted to buy-again the Gucci glasses I used to have, the ones I lost on NJ Transit a year and a half ago. But I don't have the dough to pony up the extra for that. I did manage to find a fairly cute pair of glasses that qualifies under the "fully covered" part of the plan. They were well hidden. Doctor Cursory told me to pick only off of a standing rack. But then I noticed a few more frames in the same price range in a glass case, asked about them, and it turns out that they qualify as well. And so in a couple of days they will be mine. And they are, basically, a cheaper non-designer version of my old Gucci glasses. Not quite as great. But better that what I have right now. And new and unscratched, with glare-proof coating for sitting in front of the computer. And I will have paid no money at all for them.
And so I say goodbye, cheap-ass glasses from 39dollarglasses.com. I am happy that you exist, because $39 was truly all I could afford when I lost my lovely Gucci glasses. But you are now going to be replaced with better glasses, glasses that won't fall off my head every time I look down. I appreciate all the reading help you've given me over the past couple of years, I really do. But it was time to move on.
11:57 p.m. - December 09, 2008
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