Last week I received several pages from Medicare which purported to explain benefits they were or were not covering for visits I and my wife had made to our doctor last April.
Finding them difficult to understand (references to charges not covered because they were hospital, not doctor’s office procedures, when we had only seen our doctor in his office, plus the difficulty of remembering details of events four months ago), I asked the doctor’s office to help me understand them, which they graciously did.
My point is that this one exchange, not counting parallel paperwork for the same visits with our secondary “medigap” insurance, required at least 1,200 percent more paperwork than we experienced as a family of four in all of our five years living in Canada covered by their national health insurance (receiving excellent care and paying exactly zero out-of-pocket medical, hospital or pharmacy costs).
Most people agree that our current health coverage system is broken, but its colossal wastefulness and inefficiency are not appreciated by the many people in this state and this country who haven’t experienced the excellent systems in other developed countries.
Just one more voice for universal single-payer health insurance.
Andrew Jackson
Montpelier