Insurance Rights and Obligations

Re: Insurance Rights and Obligations

Submitted by 3Hours2Live on Tue, 2009-10-20 - 19:03

Hi ShaBar, Epilepsy is major Brick Wall for new Insurance coverage. Maybe the insurance laws will soon change. Dropping existing coverage may result in only Medicaid or Medicare coverage in the future, without even larger investments, because of pre-existing conditions clauses in new policies popping-up whenever expensive medical services/prescriptions occur. Catch-22 with Medicare/Medicaid follows: A complex partial seizure in my sophmore year in high school gave me unwanted notoriety with school officials when a teacher I had already complained of raping me attacked me in class during the seizure. My classmates told me I went stupid looking and started crunching up individual pages in my notebook with one hand, then my teacher flipped my desk over and dragged me out into hallway by my legs. When they followed us out into the hallway, he had my pants down and when he looked up at them, he took off running down the hallway. I got up and took off running in the opposite direction. I was isolated to library for the rest of the school year, and in the middle of my junior year, my schooling was discontinued. The files involving this event were used against me by the U.S. Department of the Treasury when I filed an employment discrimination complaint against the IRS fifteen years later. I had a few low paying legitimate jobs after leaving high school, but problems with partial seizures brought each one to a short life. The best paying and longest lasting job was at a truck-to-railcar reload facility managed by a guy who had just left the priesthood, but in about a year and half, we had a major falling-out officially over the magazines left behind by the truckers. When he started making threats and acting violently, I left and hit the streets on the West coast. When I was lucky enough to have enough money to go to university, I used my parents' then address, and graduated magna cum laude a few years later. When I tried to get a job relevant to my degree (I got told repeatedly that my degree disqualified me for lesser jobs!!!), aspects of my epilepsy were used to refuse me the jobs. After talking my problems over with my former professors, I started filing discrimination complaints against the federal agencies that used verifiable testing techniques. My lawyer told me I would have to provide current medical verification of my epilepsy, but the county offices refused medical services until I exhausted all of my rights with the Social Security Administration and the State Rehabilitation Department. Social Security told me I didn't work enough for Social Security myself, but that I worked too much to be eligible under my parents' Social Security (since I was otherwise eligible with epilepsy through-out my adulthood, because I had epilepsy while dependent on them before I worked too much). So my previous working disqualified me for Medicare and Social Security Disability. Using services of Medicaid and MediCruz, the State Rehabilitation Department decided that my epilepsy was too severe for rehabilitation to result in any likelihood of the possibilty of the ability to engage in any gainfull activity (i.e., getting and holding a job that pays something), and told me to get lost. The Federal Courts refused to recognize State generated medical records, and told me I didn't have any proof I was disabled and protected in any way as disabled under the law. The Federal Court of Appeals for the 9th District told me I presented a very good legal oral argument to them, which they held as evidence that I couldn't possibly be disabled under the Rehabilitation Act (ADA) without acceptable medical evidence, ten legal years later, and threw my claims out. Since my parents worked enough paying into Social Security to be eligible, I was also eligible as their offspring with a disability before adulthood (which would have offset many burdens on my parents too), so I lost my Medicare coverage, lost more than $70,000 in Social Security Disability payments, and lost access to decent Rehabilitation Services by trying too hard to engage in gainful activities, which only gave me a lifetime "categorically needy" status subject to endless State Budget Cuts. I now strive to survive on SSI and Medicaid by being a Skeptical Malcontent for inspiration, with Catch-22 working for and against meager government services and lifelong epilepsy. My latest Catch-22 if over public transportation not crossing county lines, with the only neurologist available under Medicaid being accross county lines, and, so far, no other means of transportation available, while the local Medicaid clinic demands I see the neurologist under threat of termination of all medical services if I don't. Tadzio