POTUS & Medical Costs

President Trump (I’m trying to see if my calling him by his title will help me to better tolerate his many foibles.) and First Lady Melania visited our troops in Iraq over the holidays, and in President Trump’s speech to them he claimed that they hadn’t had any pay raises in ten years and that they were soon going to get a ten percent (or even higher) pay raise. He made it sound like he would be personally responsible for this raise. “Huzzah, Huzzah, for me! See how much I’ve done for you?” But what he said wasn’t true. There have been annual pay raises for the last ten years and in 2019 they will not be getting anything like the ten percent he mentioned. It’s not so much that he was lying; he was just aggrandizing what he thought may have been true. He exaggerates more often than he lies. Words come spilling out of him without any fact-checking or with very little thought and without heeding anything his advisers tell him. And if they tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, he fires them and looks for someone who’ll tell him what he does want to hear. His disregard for facts and truth frightens me more than all the other things that frighten me about his presidency.

          And now he’s threatening to close our southern border and continue his federal shutdown until he gets the five billion for his wall. Just like a temper-tantrumy kid, his next move will probably be to stomp his feet and hold his breath until he turns blue. I think I’d enjoy seeing that. How are we going to survive for another two years of this man? No one seems to know the answer. I guess my calling him President Trump didn’t help. I still can’t tolerate him. A POTUS by any other name would still not smell as sweet.

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             Medical costs—what’s billed and what’s approved. I just examined the summary of the medical charges that my insurance provider sent me regarding my recent hospital stay in November. These numbers are for the total charges paid by Medicare and Arizona Blue Cross-Blue Shield. The differences between what was billed and what was approved is dramatic, mind-blowing . . . and very confusing. For example, the hospital bill for five days (room and lab work) was just under $40,000 and what was approved was just under $9,000. Do lawyers get together to negotiate what will actually be paid? Then there are all the charges submitted by various doctors who may have spoken to me or waved hello as they went by my door--$1750 billed, $1060 approved; Sonora Quest Lab for bloodwork, $590 billed, $72 approved. The totals for everything connected to my five-day hospital stay--$44,400 billed, $11,000 approved. Can you understand why I’m confused? These numbers make no sense; these charges make no sense. I wonder how it would all work out if we had socialized medicine regulated by the federal government instead of all these haphazard charges that sound way too exorbitant. I’m sure I won’t live long enough to have an answer to my wonderment.