For most of my life, my posture has been lousy. My shoulders hunch forward, I never sit with my legs down properly (in large part because I’m very short, and I can’t comfortably sit that way, since my feet won’t be flat on the floor), and of course, there’s the scoliosis. Two different forms for scoliosis, actually. Thanks to all of that, and a doctor who majorly screwed up (she measured my legs wrong, and for years I wore a lift on the WRONG FOOT!) I have a lot of neck and back pain. And that’s even before you consider my mis-aligned kneecaps, which have worn away most of the cartiladge on the outer sides of my knees.
So you won’t be surprised to learn that I have been in physical therapy for neck and back pain a bunch of times over the years. I’m doing it now, too. But this time it’s really helping. Probably because I’m not getting cut off after a few short months, like all of the previous times.
If you’ve ever done physical therapy, I’m guessing this will sound familiar. I would go in 1-2 times per week for a few months, be given exercises to do at home each time, and then at the end, told that if I go home and do the exercises, I’ll be fine. And when I wasn’t fine, when I came back for more help, I was treated like I failed.
And yes, I admit that I wasn’t as consistent with the exercises as I should have been. But even so, it felt like something else was going on.
That brings us to 2017 when, for the first time in my life, I went to physical therapy appointments for the entire year. Sometimes I would go 2 or 3 weeks in a row. Sometimes I would miss 2-3 weeks. But always, I went back. In between, I did my exercises at home. Sometimes I was consistent and sometimes I wasn’t, but I always tried.
And it helped. A lot! So you can imagine my disappointment when I went to physical therapy yesterday to be told that Medicare has lowered its coverage limit.
Oh boy.
On the bright side, this might not effect me. She had checked and last year I would have just squeaked by under the 2018 limit. Still, it’s disconcerting. We will need to be careful.
We talked about having me come in less often. Or maybe skipping a few weeks here and there. Or maybe coming in for shorter appointments, since the limit is on the dollar amount covered, not the number of visits.
Not for the first time (not even the only time that day!) I came up against the problem of having to manage my health in the face of insurance limits.
On the one hand, this is totally fair. After all, they need to set limits, right? On the other hand, this is my health, and isn’t the whole point of paying into the system so that it will cover me when I need it to? What good is it if it won’t. I’m not the cheapest person on the insurance’s rolls, but I’m far from the most expensive. And damn it, I want my physical therapy! Without physical therapy, my pain and posture will get worse and that will harm me in a lot of other ways, limiting my ability to work, meaning I will need even more benefits.
After all, I am losing a bunch of my benefits this year (yeah, that’s a topic for another post) because I earned more last year. Don’t they want to keep me off those benefits? They should want me to be healthy, if only for financial reasons. They should consider that more physical therapy will actually save the system money in the long run.
But no one worries about that. They certainly don’t worry about the human being behind the numbers. The human being who simply wants to be in less pain, who wants to stick with the thing that works, who tries so hard to feel better every single day.
My physical therapist warned me that Medicare changes its limits every year, and she implied that future changes would not be in my favor. I am not surprised. But I am horribly, sadly, painfully disappointed.
Chronic Rants 