I can certainly sympathize with seniors who are perplexed with new changes to Medicare. While I was employed at a county hospital in California, I supervised the Medicare billing department, among other things.
I was employed in March 1965, just prior to Medicare. There were about a dozen people in the business office and we had one person who handled all the billing. Because of the nature of county hospitals in those days, we did very little billing. Then along came the monsters. By the time I retired, I was personally supervising 22 people.
I am very grateful that I am among those fortunate few who have no use for the new drug program. I have senior friends who spend a fortune on prescriptions. Most of them, like myself, don’t qualify anyway. This program is strictly for very low-income people.
I don’t know what the answer is. I do know that whoever is explaining the program to seniors probably doesn’t know all that much either.
The problem, as I see it, is that different intermediaries interpret the program in their own way, much as different religions interpret the Bible.
Much money is wasted by the intermediaries on useless seminars, on nit-picking who’s right and who’s wrong. Sen. Edward Kennedy has long been a proponent of socialized medicine and I am totally in agreement. If the program was administered by just one intermediary, it would help a whole lot.
I know how frustrated most seniors are about medical care. If I said it one time over the years, I said it a thousand times: “Pay nothing until you get a bill from us. That letter saying ‘This is not a bill’ means exactly that.”
It’s not much help, but I have had my say.
JANICE POLAND
Everett
* I-912
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