Navigating those senior years

Stefanik now against walking through a metal detector

The Front Page

Morning Update

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

By Ken Tingley

It is a label I struggle with - senior citizen.

It is accurate. I turned 65 on my last birthday. My wife will be 64 on her next birthday.

Since we both retired, we are surprised at how much time we spend navigating doctors,  insurance companies and drug stores. We regularly joke you have to be retired just to handle our prescriptions and appointments.

Thankfully, my wife and I are fairly well equipped to deal with the challenges. My 40-year career as a newspaper man means I have no problem questioning authority and asking questions about things I don’t understand.

My wife’s nearly two decades as a nurse and 11 years as a cancer patient means she can go toe-to-toe with any doctor or nurse so she understands what she is putting in her body and how it will effect her.

We ask a lot of questions.

Some years ago, we noticed that the co-pay for my wife’s doctor went from $40 to $80.

We asked why.

We were told there was $40 for chemotherapy and another $40 to see the doctor.

We objected.

We called it a scam.

We called it double dipping, especially since the doctor seemed to be reaping another $40 just for walking into the room during chemo and asking my wife how she was feeling.

My wife is still doing chemotherapy. After all these years of treatments, she jokes that whenever a mosquito bites her, it dies from the toxicity of her blood.

Sadly, the double dipping continues. When my wife goes for the chemo, she pays her $40 co-pay while checking in for her blood work. She then has to go upstairs for the chemotherapy. They don’t handle payments upstairs so inevitably she gets a bill in the mail for another $40. She has tried calling billing with little success. Twice she was left  on hold for 30 minutes without getting any answers.

Recently, she thought she was finally caught up on all the bills when she got a letter  from a collection agency. She was told she owed $40.

The hospital sent her to collection over $40.

The easiest thing would have been to pay the collection company and put the whole matter to rest right there. We could afford it. But you don’t know my wife.

She reviewed her bills and her payments and she didn’t think she owed that $40.

I told her to pay in pennies the next time she went for chemotherapy.

Instead, she complained to patient services about being sent to collection over a $40 bill that she did not believe she owed in the first place. They told her they would get back to her.

She got a call a few days ago. She was told she did not owe the $40. In fact, she was told the hospital owed her money, but they still weren’t sure how much.

We are grizzled veterans of the health care system. But we sometimes wonder about the senior citizen who has not had our experience, who takes everything their doctors say as gospel, who readily hands over another $40 when the hospital says they owe it, whether they can afford it or not and always caves when they are sent to collection.

We worry about those people because one of these days we may be one of them.

But sending someone to collection over a medical bill - especially one that has been bungled - is never okay.

Our health care system needs to be better.

Next event

Ten months ago, my collection of columns - “The Last American Editor” came out. It was my first book.

Since then, I have been speaking at libraries, senior centers and any group who has an interest in journalism or newspapers. I’ve spoken more in the past year than I did for my entire 40-year newspaper career. It has been a lot of fun.

It has been especially gratifying to meet the people who said they read me religiously and missed my column.

But it has also been great to hear what they are thinking and what their concerns are about the future of journalism.

I will be speaking again on Thursday at the Rockwell Falls Public Library in Lake Luzerne at 6:30 p.m. I will be talking about some of my favorite stories from my years in newspapers.

I hope you can make it.

You can’t make this up

Maury Thompson reported in The Post-Star Tuesday that Rep. Elise Stefanik objects to having to walk through a magnetometer on her way to the floor of the House of Representatives.

“I believe these are unconstitutional in the sense that you can’t block elected members of Congress from going in to vote,” Stefanik said in a June 11 interview on the podcast “John Solomon Reports.”

I suppose my Eastern Kentucky degree doesn’t hold much weight next to Stefanik’s Harvard credentials, but my guess is that metal detectors had not been invented when the Constitution was written. And since they are meant to protect members of Congress from harm in these uncertain times, it seems odd thing to object to and even odder to object on Constitutional grounds.

Perhaps, the next time I’m at Albany Airport, I will tell the TSA agents they are violating my constitutional rights in the sense that it prevents me from my pursuit of happiness on my impending vacation.

I will tell them I am following my congresswoman’s example.

Tweet of the Day

NPR @NPR

Over 100 million people in America are now affected by medical debt, as the U.S. health care system pushes patients into debt on a mass scale. Here are their stories — what they've given up for it, and how they're living with the burden.

n.prMedical debt upended their lives. Here’s what it took from themFirst, they were struck by illness and then by medical bills they couldn’t pay. Here are seven stories of Americans living under the shadow of health care debt.