All in One Day

On an evening the nation is tied up in a debate over health care, we find ourselves muddled in the thick of it in a much more personal way. I am not one to get carried away or fired up over political issues; I suppose I've always left that to my mom. Yet there is something so unbelievably raw about all of this that leaves me furious, feeling desperate, and saddened by what is. On this very day of such focus on health reform, Mama Marian was denied by Blue Cross Blue Shield for Skilled Nursing Care at McLean. We are saddled with choices that seem no one should have to make... choices that should not be choices at all.

And yet, tonight we are doing just that. Dad is home calculating how many days we could buy if we cashed in his life insurance policy, if we took out a second mortgage on the house that is just a couple of years from being paid off... I am four hundred miles away reading up on Connecticut Title XIX Medicaid. What would we have to do to get Medicaid coverage for my dying mom to let her have a few more weeks? Sell a car? Divorce after 34 years of marriage just to have it on paper? Sell the house? After over 30 years of working five plus days per week, raising two kids, and never having to depend on public assistance... ready to settle down and retire... almost. I'm home with my highlighter and pencil trying to decipher how I can somehow bring my parents' "estate" down to $1600 in assets so that they can qualify for a Medicaid Spend-Down to keep my mom comfortable for a couple more months. There is something so completely disheartening and maddening about politicizing health care and how on earth did we come to this place?

We may be able to access Mom's $25,000 lifetime limit on Hospice Care for continued care at McLean. And how much does that buy us? 38 days of inpatient care. 38 days. 38 days ago we were coming home from a "vacation" with Mom. Where could we be 38 days from now? Taking Mom home from McLean with a catheter, unable to feed herself, in breathtaking pain... without help because we've exhausted our "lifetime limit"? How unbelievably inhuman can this nation be?

There is a part of me that is embarrassed to write this, to put myself out there so much... to be so enraged by politics. But how can I not? How can I give into that little faux moderate conformist within me, submit to its attempts at pulling me back with its "can't we all just get along slogan"? It's too important to let this go and pretend it doesn't hit me right at home. It's too much tonight. Too much in one day.