Wednesday, January 30, 2008

The Medicaid Jungle

Emily, who has down syndrome, turned 19 in September. Our pediatrician's office, who previously had accepted developmentally disabled kids as patients until they were out of school at 22, wrote us a letter telling us to find another MD.

This isn't as easy as it sounds. There are darn few local medicaid adult MDs here. But Humana Family has a couple good ones. We had already switched to Humana for Matt and Jenny and loved the doctor. So we wanted to get Emily on Humana as well.

So my husband calls medicaid and they tell him his name is not on the list as the legal contact. So he calls SSI and tells them to put his name on there where it should have been for years. They do that and he calls Medicaid back again.

They say that they do not have his name on there. Not in his full name or his initials or his initial and first name. SSI had told him to tell medicaid to conference call SSI for the info iof there was any problem. I guess medicaid said that SSI must initiate the conference call.

But before he got further into that he asked what name they DID have down there if it wasn't he or me? They wouldn't tell him. But they WOULD tell the name to Emily, who has no understanding at all of medicaid, SSI or money in general. So he put the call on speaker and Emily introduced herself, and they told Emily the name.

It was my husband's first initial only and the last name. Argh! So anyway she'd better not get sick until the beginning of March, as it won't kick in til them.

Dumb stuff we have to go thru daily when you rely on the government for your income. I want to get away from that so bad...

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