Make Medicare, Medicare Supplements and Healthcare More Efficient

We try to keep it real here, so this is a real life situation that someone had to go through. It is not just unfortunate but disgraceful that this should happen to people who have paid every cent of their premiums for everything that they had to pay through the years.

Then in the years that they needed it most, it didn’t come through for them the way it should have. Here is the story exactly as told to the Des Moines Register on June 13, 2009. The reason this is so important is that there are many people in this type of situation, and though the government is trying to fix all the healthcare woes, they don’t seem to be hearing the people. This is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Ziesman

My husband, Floyd Ziesman, passed away in March 2008 from a rare lung cancer. For 10 years, we had to fight the system, even though we had group health insurance through my employers as well as his Medicare and Medicare supplement.

When I would lose a job due to financial cutbacks or bankruptcy, we paid COBRA because of the expensive drugs that Floyd was taking that were not covered under Medicare Part D.

We unwittingly did not understand first-payer, second-payer and third-payer changes under COBRA. Mayo Clinic did not understand, either. So a hospital stay in 2000 resulted in the bill not being paid by any of the insurance policies. After being sued, we paid it so that Mayo Clinic would still service Floyd.

The next time this happened in 2004, again no one would pay. This time, I contacted 12 elected officials. U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Sens. Stewart Iverson and Mike Gronstal and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack all worked to straighten out the mess. Even though the group insurance was still receiving its full premium of $1,135 a month, Medicare was to be billed first when I had become an inactive employee.

A single-payer national health insurance would have eliminated the hassle we endured while also trying to take care of Floyd’s medical needs.

The United States can make universal, comprehensive coverage affordable by saving the hundreds of billions we now waste on insurance paper pushing and other overhead costs in trying to connect coverage from health facilities to the different insurance companies.

– Julie Stewart Ziesman, Alden

Hopefully, these words will be heard by the government officials that Mrs. Ziesman wrote to and they will take the story to D.C. and make sure it is heard and understood. Medicare, Medicare Supplement and healthcare reform is not easy, but it is supposed to save money while benefittin the people. The stories like these need to be heard.