Frustration, Medicaid and Heartbreak

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I just spoke to a very unfortunate lady. Though I won't reveal any of her information, of course, this really points up to me how messed up the US Government run health care system is. She'd been dependent on her husband's insurance for medical care and prescription insurance. Then, as a dear family member of hers was dying, her husband decided to cheat on her. Understandably and rightfully, she decided to divorce him. Several decades of marriage came to an end, but so did her health insurance, so she had to go to Medicaid. As I see so often, there was a computer glitch that made it look like she still had her husband's insurance - causing Medicaid to not cover any of her prescriptions. This included an antibiotic she badly needed to treat an infection. Medicaid dragged their feet on calling her old insurance, and she was stuck. When this nice lady called me, she was in an isolation room of her hospital, sick with a severe staph infection that had invaded her whole face. At one point she'd been blind and barely able to speak. I work for the company that her husband had insurance with. Originally she was just calling me to ensure her coverage with us was inactive. She mentioned to me that she always had to wait forever for Medicaid and they were always mean to her. My protective instincts took over. So much had happened to this poor woman already! I offered to take care of it. Though I had to wait on hold for about forty five minutes, I called Medicaid and gave them the information they needed to prove that she indeed did not have any other insurance! Problem solved, but it was much more difficult than it should have been, for all of us. She should have been able to get it fixed on the first day so she could have gotten her antibiotics and avoided her disfiguring infection and her hospital stay. This is the kind of crap that happens when the same people who run the DMV also run healthcare!