“Our lives are frittered away by detail!” cried Henry David
Thoreau. “Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
Thoreau never had to deal with an insurance company, a medical
provider, a driver’s license bureau, the Internal Revenue Service,
or a suburban school system. Pah, Mr. Thoreau! Today, every family
needs a designated diddley s—t shoveler just to deal with the
details of modern life. Otherwise you get buried in unfinished
paperwork, swamped with unfulfilled tasks, and start running in
circles trying to get all your household errands done.
Sometimes you still can’t do things right.
When we moved back to Massachusetts in late summer, we had to
enroll our boys in schools, and schools required health
certificates, and that meant finding a doctor and getting the boys
an annual physical exam. Suburban parents know you have to make
appointments for those exams starting in about June, pediatricians
get so backed up. Our boys couldn’t get their exams until November.
The schools, knowing our situation and knowing that the physicals
were pending, let the health forms slide until then.
Second school year rolls around and I make appointments early
for the boys to have their exams. We get to the doctor’s office —
clever me, I have arranged to have both boys examined at the same
time — and the doc, looking over the paperwork, says, “You can’t
come for this appointment yet. It hasn’t been a year. Your
insurance won’t pay for it.”
A day more than a year, fine. A day less, no go. I had to make
new appointments on a carefully selected date. Every year since,
the boys’ physicals have migrated to later in the year. Our
youngest may be getting his 2015 appointment in March.
ABOUT TWO YEARS AGO, my health insurance company began refusing to
pay my bills, giving the reason “has other insurance.” I had no
other insurance. Somebody at the hospital I visit regularly had
assumed I had Medicare, which I did not at the time. That one piece
of mistaken data metastasized through my health care records, and I
had to chase down every single instance of the mistaken invocation
and find the person responsible and ask for a resubmission of the
bill in question.
So I got plenty of practice for the day when, as it turned out,
I was legally required, as an End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD)
patient, to apply for and get Medicare. And when, inevitably,
because my Medicare enrollment forms had not been filled out
correctly, bills began to be refused because “patient has other
insurance.”
OVER LABOR DAY WEEKEND, I got rear-ended. The accident happened at
one of New England’s ubiquitous “rotaries,” circular traffic merges
that sometimes occur at inopportune, not to say foolish, places.
One such place is the junction of north-south Route 93 with
east-west Route 213. At city street speeds, a traffic circle may
make some sense. At highway speeds, in a foggy drizzle, one timid
driver who decides to stop instead of yield will create a multi-car
pileup.
I just managed a panic stop, coming to a halt mere feet from the
bumper of the car in front of me. I had time only for the fleeting
thought, “That was a close one” when I got banged in the rear,
hard. The car that hit me, I could see in my mirror, had the hood
buckled and sprung open.
There was nowhere to stop without inviting yet another accident.
I drove home and called the Methuen police department immediately,
the local jurisdiction. No report of such an accident. Call the
State Police, the Methuen desk officer recommended. I did. No
report with them, either.
I suppose I should consider that lucky. Imagine the paperwork
that might have been involved in a multi-car rear-ender, with
multiple drivers and insurance companies.
So I simply had to fix my own car’s damage, not inconsiderable,
and get my car re-inspected. When I get up from my chair, I’m going
to go try to get that done. For the fourth or fifth day in a row.
Motor vehicle inspection stations are as backed up as children’s
doctors.
SO HOORAY FOR MR. THOREAU. Conscientious as he was, he didn’t
realize how good he had things before making his famed retreat from
society. You can go see a replica of his hut near the place where
he actually built it, on Walden Pond in Lexington. It looks nice.
You could live in it and enjoy it. And then somebody would send you
a credit card.
