1, 2 and 3: Alex’s school years begin. I was a little worried because he’s been giving me a lot of attitude about his new school. I knew full well that this was how he manifests anxiety about the change, but nonetheless, you can’t help but worry.
He came home from the first day of school sporting a bandaid on his knee, marker streaks on his knee, and an award for following directions in P.E. class. We haven’t heard any complaints since. 🙂
Things are a-changin’, because of school. We have to be there at 7:30 in the morning (!), and thus, I have more or less lost my 5:30a.m. blog time. Readjusting parameters. Stay tuned.
4. Stirring up the pot again…I want to add an addendum to my post on the national health care debate. My mom asked me, if families have to pay the total cost of therapies, where insurance companies don’t, what exactly that amounts to. Well, here is a portion of that picture, based on the statement we got in the mail yesterday. Insurance approved ONE 1-hour diagnostic speech therapy visit for Julianna this summer. The therapist’s company billed insurance a total of $500. Yes, I said FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. The insurance company approved FIFTY. Now, I don’t know that this is the total picture, but as far as I’m concerned, this raises an awful lot of questions about the state of the health care industry–if insurers will pay fifty dollars for a service that the family would pay five hundred for. Or do companies bill ridiculous amounts, knowing they’ll get only a sliver? Do they have separate billing rates for families, then, or would we pay them $500 an hour? No matter how you look at it, this is SCREWED UP. If someone knows more than I do about this, I would love to be educated.
5. Click this link and scroll down to #6 to see a truly UNBELIEVABLE ALLIGATOR. (Hello, tick-tock crocodile!) All I can say is…WHOA. Maybe if we’d been paddleboating here, Alex’s fears wouldn’t have been so off-base!
6. I went to see my massage therapist last night. He discovered a whole new area of my body that can cause me excruciating pain on the table. Would you believe it was the palm of my right hand? Fortunately, my muscles have learned to be very compliant, and I only had to breathe through the pain for about a minute and a half, all told, before it eased off. And holy cow, the difference in typing this morning!
7. My strawberries, which yielded so beautifully this spring, are turning brown and dying. In consult with my grandmother, I have developed the theory that it is heat and moisture–we had so much rain this summer, in combination with such horrific heat (100+ heat indexes for weeks on end) that they got root rot. I also lost my baby sugar maple–all the leaves just up and turned brown and fell off one day–and my aspen, which I hav babied, has lost virtually all its leaves to a fungal infection. So am I just out of luck, starting over? Is there any chance they’ll bounce back next spring? Gardeners among you, please give me hope!
Kathleen M. Basi 
Owen starts next Wednesday and I’m having such mixed feelings about it. I’m excited for him to start this new phase in his life but I am also not looking forward to leaving behind the early childhood years with him. And don’t even get me started on the early morning routine!
As for the health insurance, I am 99.9% sure that you would be charged less if you were to pay out of pocket. I saw a therapist once who asked me if I had insurance and told me that if I didn’t use my insurance, she would charge me less, but if I used my insurance, I would be charged more. We have been fortunate with Medicaid for Cameron thus far. Does Julianna have that? It’s my understanding that Medicaid is going to pay for most, if not all, of Cam’s Speech and OT. We also get $3,000/mo. worth of respite and I’m pretty sure they are also going to pay our insurance premiums ($200/mo!) for our insurance through Cody’s employer. Those are both part of the waiver he’s on though. All this is still kind of in the works so I’m hoping it all works as they say it will.
My son went to speech therapy for about 7 years. He initially went to Rusk twice a week, and because it was neurological, our insurance covered it with a $20 co-pay. Once, the insurance sent us a letter saying it wasn’t going to cover that particular month’s therapy, because they said Rusk sent the paperwork late. The bill for that month? $17,000. For 8 hours therapy. There is no way no matter how you slice it that 8 hours of speech therapy– no equipment, no drugs, just a therapist and a boy talking in a small room – could possibly cost that. And I called them and said hope they didn’t really think we were going to pay that cause we didn’t have it. And she said oops oh no, that’s a mistake, don’t worry about it. And we didn’t. And eventually we found the university, where with discounts and scholarships it cost us less than $20 a visit with no insurance involved. He was officially released from speech just this summer…my estimate is that he went to speech about 400 times and we paid over the years around $8000 to get him where he is today.
Oh, you must be floating on air, to be past speech therapy! Congratulations! What I think is so sad, frustrating and difficult is not knowing what these amounts involved are. And if, as Sarah said, the billing amount is different depending on who’s being billed, that’s hard to justify. It ought to cost what it costs, and make all insurance adjustments based around that.
And the trouble is, except for people like you, me and Sarah, others don’t have a reason to care about this issue, really. If it doesn’t touch you directly, it’s hard to get bent out of shape about it. And I can’t faul tpeople for that; we all have plenty to get our BP up anyway (interesting initials, eh?).
It is a good thing that young children are cute even when they are little brats. Wait, am I going to get in trouble for implying that your son is sometimes a brat? Hm. What I meant to say is that he is really cute, and I am glad that he likes school!
I am glad to hear your son likes his new school. I hope you are not saddled with a $450 bill for one hour of speech therapy, maybe it was a typo 🙂
We did speech with my son for years, usually to the tune of $60/hr–back in the day when insurance didn’t pay for speech unless it was recover from something that happened after birth.
I went to PT earlier this year. The therapist put a heating pad on my shoulder, showed me some exercises and watched me do them, put a cold pack on my shoulder, and put a pain patch on my arm. I was there a little less than an hour and she had another patient at the same time. The bill was almost $300/session. My insurance paid about $80. There is something wrong with that picture.