And so I stay in the system, waiting out the next few weeks before I’m married, wondering what in world we’ll do once, legally, we are no longer single. And it scares me because I worry that I could very easily end up right back where I was when I was 24 — with no safety net and not enough money to buy health insurance.
—Caitlin Shetterly
THE GREAT PAPER CHASE
I got sent to collections this year for the first time in my life. I owed money on my son. He’s still not completely paid off.
Though there were no threats to repossess him, the tones were menacing. The envelope had bold red stripes on it. I admit my wife and I were intimidated, which has been really helpful as we struggle with losing my wife’s salary and the general trials and tribulations of raising our three-year-old daughter and infant son. Somehow, despite the fact that I run two international publications and manage a staff that bridges the Atlantic Ocean, and even on just my salary we make significantly more than the state median of $43,000 a year in household income, I was unable to keep track of our medical bills to the point that one of them went unpaid for 90 days.
How did this happen? Well, let me try to give you the short version. I’m pretty sure it’s not totally my fault:
In the span of four months, Gus was born at Mercy Hospital, had bronchitis and chest X-rays (remember these — they’ll return later) at Maine Medical Center, and then had minor surgery, also at Maine Medical Center.
That bout of bronchitis was scary enough, but it also produced an ear infection, one of many Gus had before the age of four months. Our three-year-old daughter Ruby has had maybe ten of them herself. We ended up agreeing with the doctor that Gus needed tubes put in his ear to drain the fluid causing the ear infections. (As an aside, the 15 minutes of room rental for that kind of minor surgery costs more than $600.)
I won’t begin to equate our troubles with the heartache suffered by families whose children have serious illnesses like cancer, but this four-month period was a nightmare for us, a gut-wrenching series of ordeals involving dozens of trips to the doctor, lots of sleepless nights, and a horrendous typhoon of paperwork and expenses.
See, between Gus’s birth and surgery, my employer switched healthcare plans, or rather offered us the “opportunity” to continue the same healthcare plan for triple the cost or to change to a new plan for roughly the same cost as we were already paying. The new plan sounds simple: for $250 a month (my employer pays the other 80 percent, and you wonder why small businesses can’t make it here) we have a $5000 deductible and a health savings account, to which I contribute $75 pre-tax every week and my employer contributes $150 a month. We can spend the account’s money with a Visa debit card, which we can actually use to buy anything (though we’d never do that, right?).
But the new plan is not the one that got us in trouble, and little wonder.
