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That sounds very frustrating, and also not surprising given... everything. I'm sorry you have to deal with that.
"Fun" fact: what public service fraud actually occurs is overwhelmingly committed by providers, not recipients.
SilverGirl That is messed up and really frustrating.
Pardon me while I go flip a table complanit thread.
Don't let sanity interfere with beaurocracy..
What a stupid system.
My wife is the registered care giver for my MIL. We live 5 miles away and she's bedbound. Her dementia is such that she thinks she's in hospital, and mumbles regularly to the nice old woman in the bed opposite her (it's a mirrored wardrobe). Anyway, organising the carers, dealing with the doctors and their receptionists, doing the cleaning in the house, paying the bills, fighting for care assessments, fighting the bank for MIL's money (despite having power of attorney) etc takes every hour she's paid for without actually having any time looking after MIL.
At least the situation isn't as bad as for @SilverGirl, at least we're given a payment weekly without much evidence needed. The fight we have is with the banks, the doctors, the prescription delivery company and the hospitals. Don't neet the extra agro on top.
Regards,
Richard
You should see the ones they tend to fit by default here in the UK. They are wired-up to the mains, obviously, and sure, they have a replacable 9V backup battery in them. But with these ones, even if your alarm starts chirping, you disconnect it from the ceiling (mains) and even remove the 9V battery to shut it up until you can get to the shop for a new one. Guess what?
They still chirp. Apparently it's a safety feature so that neither disconnecting it or removing the battery will allow you to be lazy in getting a new battery. I imagine it's done by storing a temporary small charge in a capacitor or something. So while these alarms cannot speak (well not yet anyway), I reckon that if they could, they would very likely be saying ...
"Oh no you don't. You can't shut me up that easily! You can disconnect me from the mains. Sure. You can even pull my backup battery. Ok then, be like that. But I'm here to annoy the living crap out of you until you replace that battery, and do so ASAP! I will protect you from being incinerated in your sleep, even if it's the last thing I get to do before I melt in the inferno I protect you from!"
You gotta love 'em, really!
Actually, I think that would make a great safety ad for TV, a campaign called "If Fire Alarms Could Talk".
Hello, I am testing speech dictation as some of my keys don't work. I need to find away to train Microsoft dictation.
Mine does talk. It scared the cheese out of me the first time it went off.
Thanks for the sympathy and solidarity, all. And @richardandtracy I think you have plenty going on. I'm blessed that although Little Dude's care needs are involved, none of them are medical in the way of medication, and I have a helpful care team as far as his primary provider, psych team, and the one sleep specialist who actually listened and passed down a diagnosis (as opposed to the first one I talked to, who was very genial right up until I stood up for my kid's wellbeing over the doctor's ego). I think having to fight for basic care like that would be the straw that finishes me off at this point. (I do have an ongoing saga with Teen Kiddo's ADHD meds, but at least that's only one prescription).
Non-complaint: Bus came on time. Burger King breakfast done. Laundry done. Ubered home and resting.
Complaint: Bloody nose 30 minutes before bus came. Bloody nose in Burger King. Bloody nose in laundromat.
Skipped drugstore toddle. Skipped grocery toddle.
Bloody f#$@%#$ nose.
Told ya tampons would be helpful !! Actually sorry about your bloody nose problem .....
And for my next trick, I will spend 3 hours and 47 minutes on the phone, almost entirely on hold, going through four different county departments, all of which tell me I'm in the wrong place and have been informed incorrectly about the nature of my issue. Including the last one, who tells me that really there's nothing that needed to be done at all, and I really should have been sent a mailing about that.
Kingdoms rose, fell, and faded to the obscurity of myth while I was on hold, all trying to solve a problem that no one could be bothered to tell me didn't exist.
Friends, I am running out of tables to flip. But at this point, with my frustration level, I feel like I could probably pull a Wonder Woman and just go for a tank.
@SilverGirl
Reading your stuff I have to say you do have my sympathy. Though to be honest it sounds no different to what we have to tolerate over here in the UK. Personally I'm just hangin' in there cause I want to see what finally becomes of the world once the crap hits the fan so to speak.
Perhaps I'll become a Renegade, all Mad Max style and have to find me my own supper in the desolate wastelands of what used to be the UK. I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy that, though, so for me I suppose it's more of a wish than a fear really!
Be a bit like that movie "28 Days Later".
...with AI, that may not be far off.
...The I Can't Stop Smike Detector From Chirping Complaint Thread.
..I've felt like that many a time after dealing with bureaucratic run-arounds. There were times I almost punched a wall, then thought the better of it as with my luck it would be right where a metal stud was.
...The Bureaucracy Is The Fetor Of Life Complaint Thread
@SilverGirl - after reading your travails with low-level minions of government, I feel you should clip them out and forward them to Gov. Waltz and ask him why it is so hard for a parent who is trying their hardest to do the best they can has these hurdles thrown up against them? Or is this coming from the Federal level? I have noticed many of my medical paperwork now is listed as 'Denied' and a few weeks ago I found out the Feds were using AI to review submissions to Medicare for payment. So things that used to be paid are now being denied out of hand without human review. Regardless you have the patience of an angel and your children are very lucky.
RE: Fire Alarms and others of that ilk: I am also one who is gifted with the chirp, chirp, chirp... that wakes you up in the middle of the night to warn the battery is running out. My flatmate can sleep through the actual alarm going off full blast. And it happens about every two/three months. I can climb up to them, but my arthritis in my hands is so bad, I can't grip the covers to open them up to change out the batteries. So I have to put in a maintenance workorder and wait. Or wait for my flatmate to be awake or home to do it. But, if it means we have enough time to get out of Dodge in a fire, I will take it. Except the cats go for cover and they will die. No way they will stick around to allow us to capture them and stuff them into carriers.
I found this picture on Facebook of the 12th Doctor with a lab.
Tip for the insurance, from a good friend of mine who works in the industry, from when we had a denial. (This is from several years ago, so pre-AI. But even then, plain old computer algorithms often did the initial approve/reject on meds, which is what happened to us.) Call insurance and ask to have the claim reviewed by a human processor (analyst, specialist). Explain the issue politely, and this may be all it takes.
In our case, Daughter started having serious allergy attacks, not yet anaphylactic, but close enough to get her an EpiPen. The allergen hadn't been identified yet (turned out to be alpha-gal from a tick bite). We used the EpiPen within a week or 2 and insurance usually allows one a year, otherwise you pay, $660+ (then) out of pocket. I asked Friend if he had any suggestions &/or a script, and took his advice. I had the approval in minutes.
****
@SilverGirl I hope that you can now care for your Dudes, and yourself, in peace. So that all those empires did not sacrifice themselves in vain. ;)
Thanks miladyderyni_173d399f47. I need to track down previous Medicare reports and compare them. I have a number of routine appointments and procedures that have been consistent for the past year or so and need to see what the pattern has been. Because I have TriCare For Life also, I haven't paid for a medical issue except when there was an ultrasound scheduled right at the first of the year and the hospital looked on the wrong TriCare database for my enrollment. I got my money back within a month. But that took two phone calls to figure it out and when I checked in, making sure I was assigned to the right version of TriCare.
I feel for you so much. We get that sort of runaround from everyone too. A couple of years ago MIL had a CT scan, which was meant to check if she was suffering from pretty severe dementia. The scan was saved in the hospital notes. Six months later, when the consultant finally got around to looking at the results (the SE England NHS waiting lists are a joke in some areas) they found the scans were missing, probably saved with someone else's notes, and they never found out who. The scans had just disappeared, poof. And because there was no evidence of severe dementia and the scan had been made, another couldn't be authorised. The fact the results were lost was irrelevant, the scan had been made, and no proof of dementia existed. Talk about banging your head on a brick wall. This took hours and hours and flipping hours of phone calls to get absolutely nowhere.
Now.. her dementia's so bad even a bureaucrat couldn't deny it, and no scans are needed. She doesn't seem to recognise her own daughter any more. That's fun, really fun to experience.
Regards,
Richard
*Groan*
@richardandtracy I'm so sorry your MIL has progressed to that point. My maternal grandmother got that far before her body finally gave out and freed her spirit, and it was heartbreaking.
As to my trevails, I think my current perfect storm is a combination of three things.
One, the hullabaloo with the medical fraud stuff in MN. I think it meant suddenly a lot of programs got revamped to appease people that there were preventative measures in place, even though no one stopped to think through whether they would actually prevent anything.
Two, I suspect there's also a staffing issue, between actual cutbacks and (how to put this without being too political, but welcome to our lived reality here in Minnesota) people being afraid to show up to work or suddenly no longer being in the state TO show up for work, due to The Ongoing Troubles. A lot of the people I've ended up talking to at the county level aren't exactly named Sarah or John Smith, and their accents are not like mine. I do honestly hope folk are doing okay, and I feel bad for the staff remaining. I suspect they're doing their best, but likely they're not trained as well as they could/should have been. Unfortunately, none of this really helps on a practical level.
Three, I have this weird confluence of switchovers going on. Little Dude should've been on a Developmental Disability Waiver this whole time, but the first social worker told me I needed to be on the CSG (Community Support Grant) program. So okay, I got on that (which had me dealing with the timecard company who thought there were exactly four weeks in a month) in fall of 2023. And then that was being phased out and replaced by the CFSS (Community First Support Services, I think?) program, which is where all this extra nonsense with the patient rep came from. So I was renewed for CSG last fall, with six months to transition, meaning CSG ended 3/31 and CFSS started 4/1.
I decided to take this opportunity to switch to a new FMS (financial management service, the timecard company) because I couldn't deal with how awful and unresponsive the other one was. So now I'm onboarding with a new program AND a new FMS.
Meanwhile, at some point last year (summer, I think?) someone finally realized after two years that I was on the wrong program and started me down the path for the DD Waiver. This is a long, LONG process, with some parts being you wait for six months or so just to get an assessment after turning in your paperwork. Well wouldn't it be, I finally reached something approaching the home stretch in early March, right when everything else was already chaos. Literally the FMS people and the DD waiver people sent me onboarding info on the same day, because of course they did. It's like the college profs that think you only have homework for their class.
As an extra bonus, apparently as part of the DD waiver, Little Dude had to be switched from income-based medical assistance to disability-based medical assistance. Except of course the actual info on this process was sparse; I just got told it happened and sent a new card. I hadn't even been sent what my new account number was for him (that I found out along the way on the call yesterday.) And then got a letter yesterday, dated the 25th, that his health insurance coverage from his old MA had been ended on the 31st (so, the day before). I'd thought it would just be switched to the new one since I hadn't received any info at all about any of this, but now I was concerned he wasn't actually covered by anything, which obviously isn't good. So there was the four hours on hold yesterday trying to take care of that, only to be informed that if you're on disability MA, you don't have an extra health insurance plan on top of it, it's just straight MA. The first three people I talked to, including two in the disability MA department, apparently did not know this. It was the "enroll in a program" person who said she couldn't enroll me.
So I wasn't sure who to believe and decided to test the theory by calling his diaper supplier last night at 5 PM, as their customer service is open till 7, and give them the new info. I figured if it was rejected, that'd tell me one thing, but if it was accepted, that'd verify the other. Plot twist: customer service is open till 7, but all the people who could enter the info for a new insurance card had gone home. So I had to call back this morning. They took my info and said it went through fine. So I guess person #4 on my call chain yesterday was the one with the clue.
I got off that call, feeling like maybe I'd finally made some progress, just to have Mom forward me an email she got this morning from the new FMS that Little Dude's paid caregiver hours had been suspended because his MA was no longer active... because of course they still had info from the first MA, not the one that started up yesterday. And of course they emailed her and not me, because she's the patient representative and not the one who actually does all the work and knows the things. (The fact that they didn't have the info is my bad, as somehow in all the chaos it hadn't clicked to me that I needed to update that with them. I'll own that part of the nonsense.) So now today I'm trying to get THAT straightened out, except it's been hours and they haven't actually gotten back to me after I sent them the new info. It won't let me log on to the timecard app, and the timecard app only lets you log hours for the day you're currently in, so I'm going to have to ask how to deal with that later, I suspect.
I think I could flip an entire army of tanks at this point.
The good news is, once the disability waiver process is complete and I'm onboarded with that, I'm being transferred off of CFSS and onto that. And that one, I can go back to being the one-woman band of both the patient rep AND the caregiver and stop torturing my poor mother. (Make it make sense.) And in theory that'll happen by the beginning of May, fingers crossed. And things should calm down somewhat once everything is set up and there's a groove. With that one I actually have a support person to help with writing the plan and suchlike, and she's fabulous and competent. She sent me the first draft of his support plan yesterday to make sure she was on the right track, and I legit cried with relief because it was so well done.
So there's light at the end of the tunnel, and if I'm lucky, it might not even be an oncoming train. But I'm supremely frustrated because literally all of this could have been avoided if they'd just put us on the appropriate program in the first place.
I know we're only on page 77, but I really feel like that should win for title of the next one.
And the saga continues....
...end of day. Still not up and running. I finally got an email telling me I needed to contact the person who did my assessment because "chances are they have not entered a waiver service agreement yet with your new PMI for the FMS to bill." I have no idea what this means, but fine. Fine. I'll contact the assessor.
Send the email.
Auto-reply: she's out until the end of the month. Contact the Social Services Front Door service to request the DD waiver manager of the day.
....please gods no, not the hold music again, but okay...
...oh. Closed for the day, call back tomorrow.
So guess what I get to do tomorrow?
Just send me to Ukraine, I'll flip those Russian tanks like tiddlywinks at this point.
Call back tomorrow? Really, that is today and it is Good Friday. The Markets are closed, not sure of banks, or government offices, but I bet military bases are on 'training days' so pharmacies and other customer support offices are closed.
@SilverGirl I will send prayers for your patience and tolerance for government employees and red tape holds out.
Happy Easter?
Mary
Prayers appreciated. Tried calling back, but this time the phone tree said my choice was invalid. I'm not sure how much more validly I could press the number 1.
Wrote an email to the person from the county who told me to go chase down the assessor and asked if there really wasn't some in-house way for the county to handle it when its employees don't complete the necessary tasks, rather than putting it back on the already overburdened person asking for support to chase all over hell's half acre and the other half acre in order to get trained professionals to complete their jobs. And that it's really not supporting the person needing the services when you're tying their caregiver up in administrative issues.
Little dude got five hours of sleep last night. I got three. Today's going to be a dumpster fire of dysregularion. I told her I desperately needed someone to step up and fix this, and to please help.
We'll see where, if anywhere, it goes. I'd spaced that today was a religious holiday, so I might be mired until Monday.
Too cold and rainy for a walk yesterday. Too cold today. Tomorrow's looking too cold and rainy again.
But at least he really likes the vacuum cleaner, and in all honesty the floors needed it pretty badly. So we've got that going for us for now, anyway.
And I've got my mp3 player and headphones with a selection of Celtic rebel tunes on loop. "O'Donnell Abu" will lift the spirits in almost any occasion.
My ancestors weren't known for lying down and giving up, and I intend to do them proud.
Onward and upward. :)
And happy Easter to you. :) Since we're nature-based in our celebrations, our basket-bearing bunny hops by when the first flowers appear, so at least I don't need to coordinate that this weekend. And really, as Teen Kiddo is old enough to know it's all Mom anyway, and Little Dude really doesn't understand the concept of the Bunny/Tooth Fairy/Santa, I've got even more wiggle room. There may be a lot of struggles, but some things are definitely easier! (Even though it's kind of a bummer not getting to share that with him... but at least I got it with Kiddo. Even if it did involve writing a letter from the tooth fairy while I was in labor with Little Dude, as Kiddo had a drastically loose tooth and I was afraid it would fall out while they were staying with my parents, and I knew good and well Kiddo would notice if the handwriting on the note was different. Left it with my dad when he dropped me at the hospital. But no... that tooth hung on for another week and I got to do the retrieval one-handed with Little Dude in my other arm because he refused to be put down. I think there ought to have been an extra Mommy Merit Badge for that one.)
Complaint: Neighbors, tell me how to prune a tree. He doesn't get that nobody was pruning trees millions of years ago. It's about 50 feet into my yard and is 2 years old. Planted from a seed.
Yep, trees did just fine without humans. Some were big, healthy, and beautiful. Others were wizend, bent, broken and diseased. Just like humans. A tree standing apart in sufficient space can grow to be a winner without help. Just like humans.
Non-complaint: I finally was able to meet the feral cat that lives in the ditch/tunnel that I can see from my kitchen porthole on the world. I walked to the local grocery today for a few essentials. On my way back I spied the orange cat sitting near the sidewalk waiting for its noon visitor, "the cat lady", to come by on her way to her job at the grocery store, and give it a can of food. I said "kitty-kitty-kitty" and it came to me, rubbed my legs, let me touch its fur (after I let it smell my hands). It felt scruffy, dirty, grizzly, & old. It has one dead eye. Based on the naturally white 1/3 end of its tail I don't think it's the original cat from several years ago but could be one of its offspring. I kept thinking of the Broadway show "Cats" and the old "Grizabella" who died and went to the "Heavyside Layer". I bet this cat has some "Memories" too.
Complaint: While at the store I got another bloody nose halfway through the store. I quickly grabbed my emergency paper napkins, pinched my nose, and was nursing it all the way back home, while trying to carry two bags of groceries and pet a cat. (*Sigh*)
Well, I got a reply from the person who told me that the person who said that "chances are" my assessor hadn't entered a waiver service agreement yet
Turns out she did enter it! On 3/25!
...so she was telling me to chase down something that had already been done, because she hadn't bothered to freaking look it up.
And now I'm told I need to wait for it to go through, which can take a few WEEKS. Any other questions, says she, I need to take them to someone else.
Yeah, no. I'm done with people passing the buck. She's not getting out of the email chain that easy.
I deserve a cookie for the level of diplomacy I executed in my reply, though I did point out that submitting it five days before my MA was cut off when approval can take WEEKS is extremely poor planning on their part, and asked what was being done to ensure that we were not being forced to bear the conseques of their actions, as this isn't just a regrettable administrative inconvenience. MY KIDS AND I DEPEND ON THAT INCOME.
I am so, so tired of these people who put in their eight hours, clock out, go home with their paychecks no matter how much actual work they dodged, and fol-de-lally-oh-well to anyone who can't clock out of the real world consequences of their massive case of "I don't wanna."
...the frustrating part is that these people are paid by your taxes. They need to be reminded if that,
Complaint: I woke just before midnight this morning. That spiking headache that drove me to bed early last evening was still there, pounding behind my right frontal lobe. And of course it is Saturday and there is very little but CNN on live right now. I do have 8 cups of coffee brewed to make it until Denver wakes up. Of course Charlie spit up just as I came back to my bedroom from the kitchen. We are on week two of this run of tummy upsets
Yesterday, I was getting ready to work on the metadata for one of the Fabiana packages I had bought from DAZ, Theory of Light 2 - Energy Flow, I found that I had it already, bought from Renderosity. So now I have two files of it, in two places. There are days you want to shoot yourself in the head. But I noticed her products are on sale this morning! I have two more to still do the metadata on them and their promos are up on my screen and show $5.00. If you didn't buy them from Renderosity already, even having to do the metadata is worth purchasing her fantastic products.
Unfortunately, a grand swath of the population seems to not care where their paycheck comes from and to whom they are beholden, they just care that they're getting the paycheck. And apparently most employers don't fire people for not doing their jobs, so the employees see no need to do them.
And I'll admit all this hits extra hard because it was exactly the sort of attitude my ex threw at me on a regular basis. And I'm just really tired of having yo scramble to protectcmy kids from grown adults' dereliction of responsibility, The "family justice system" is pretty much the same. Yes, they pull support from his paycheck, but not the gullible amount he owes because, they tell me, that woukd create hardship for him. Who cares about the hardship of the prson with the actual kids? They need to be the ones to figure something out. But hey, don't be cranky, he still owes it. It goes in the arrears balance, and I'll get it eventually, even if they have to take it out of his retirement checks twenty years from now! But it doesn't accrue interest, because that would cause him hardship and distress, too, and him having distress is bad for the kids. Or so they tell me.
But hey, I'm still divorced, so there's that. Even on the rough days, I'm still divorced, and captain of my own ship... even if it is sailing straight through a hurricane.