My mother just got her Medicare enrollment paperwork.

Lyric

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Sun Apr-10-11 11:16 PM
Original message

My mother just got her Medicare enrollment paperwork.

She brought it all to me so I could look over it for her, because she was confused about what it all means. It says that she'll have to pay a premium of about $115 a month in order to have Medicare Part B (the health insurance part) and (if I'm interpreting the handbook correctly) that her prescription drug coverage (Part D) is a separate thing that will cost extra.

She is very, very ill. She's on oxygen 24/7 for emphysema, recently had a coronary bypass, and usually can't even walk from the couch to the toilet without help. She can't shower by herself. She can't dress herself. She can't cook. She can't do ANYTHING. She is 100%, completely and permanently disabled. She gets less than $800 a month in Social Security Disability, plus Food Stamps and (up until now) Medicaid. That's not even enough to pay all of her bills without help. Because she runs an oxygen concentrator and a humidifier 24 hours a day and lives in a small, broken-down, rented shack of a house with old, energy-hogging appliances, her electric bill is sky high. She can't afford another $115 a month for the Medicare premiums. She can't even afford an extra $50 a month. If the government substantially cuts the Food Stamp program, her finances are so tight that she'll be eating even less than the one decent meal a day that she eats right now.

But her biggest fear is about medical expenses. Right now, she has Medicaid--but she's terrified that if she waits and keeps getting Medicaid instead of signing up immediately for Medicare, her eventual Medicare premiums will just keep getting higher and higher. I think the state Medicaid program will pay her Part B premiums for her, but not her Part D premiums, and apparently if they pay the Part B premiums, then she can't get any other Medicaid assistance...including prescription drug coverage. She takes about 12 medications a day, none of which she can afford without Medicaid.

We are very worried about this. We're scared that Medicaid will be eliminated or severely cut, and she'll lose the one health insurance program that doesn't require her to pay a premium that she can't afford. We're scared that if she gives up the Medicaid and joins Medicare voluntarily now, she'll lose the only avenue she has to pay for her medications. We're scared that is she keeps Medicaid and passes up the chance to get Medicare Part B, the Republicans will find a way to eliminate or cut Medicaid and she'll be stuck with Medicare premiums that are even more unaffordable for her than they are right now. We're scared that if the right-wing continues its march toward Randian insanity, both Medicaid AND Medicare will be lost (or compromised so much that they might as well be lost) and then she'll have no help left at ALL.

Mom is the only parent that my siblings and I have left, and the only grandparent that my son has ever known. She dropped out of high school to care for her sick grandmother, and worked hard, manual labor jobs for minimum wage all her life until she got too sick to do that work anymore. She has an amazing life story and family history. Even though her immediate family has always been poor, she comes from the strongest progressive, working-class roots imaginable--the same family as Friedrich Engels, the famous contemporary of Marx and co-father of the communist theory, and George Engel, one of the seven men who were wrongly hanged in the aftermath of the Haymarket Massacre. Her life is not worthless just because she's poor. She, along with ALL of the people who need Medicaid and Medicare, deserves better than to be tossed aside by the heartless right-wing as an unwanted social parasite. Her grandchildren deserve better. Her kids, who've already suffered enough hardship and loss to last a lifetime, deserve better than to lose their last remaining parent. In the wealthiest nation in America, nobody should have to die of poverty.

She's not old. She's only 55. Her bypass was very successful and what seemed to be a terminal health situation for her has improved amazingly in the past year. She might still have years, maybe even a decade or more of life ahead of her unless she loses access to healthcare. If she hadn't spent the first 39 years of her life without access to any preventative medical care beyond the emergency room, she probably wouldn't be as sick as she is right now. That's ironic, actually. For all that our right-wing fellow citizens complain about how "expensive" Medicare is, it would be far less expensive if only we'd had the generosity and foresight to provide universal healthcare decades ago. So many of the sick, older people whose medicals bills are so high would be much LESS sick right now and would have fewer expensive medical bills if only they'd had healthcare all along. We never seem to learn that lesson.

This is my Mom, taken today at my house. This is the face of a real person who's at risk if the Democratic Party fails to protect programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Food Stamps. She's not a number. She's not a faceless statistic. She's right here, along with two of her grandsons (my nephews) who need her very much. Her name is Debbie, and she's NOT a lazy person looking for a handout. She's a sincerely needy person who worked her ass off to raise three kids in poverty, and her abused body just gave out. She can't work anymore, but that doesn't mean that she doesn't deserve to live.