Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (230)
October 28, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 190: Blergh. I made myself go to bed early (for me) last night and still felt like a waterlogged foam pillow trying to get up.
My plan to start the week with enough rest was derailed by a jerk male of indeterminate age going around the neighborhood banging on / kicking in doors. I contacted all the neighbor-friends and found out it already happened to one of them. Their kids reported it sounded like a real break-in attempt so my dander was up. Whoever this is needs to be caught – this is stupid and dangerous. I strung together about 8 hours, even after the requisite 2-3 hours of settling down time (trying to read), but felt like I got no rest at all.
This morning was not much better. We notified a few more neighbors and found out that we’re the fourth ones that we know of to be hit and there’s more than one of them. Then I remembered that, many years ago, a friend’s brother was murdered in a break-in and I never heard from the family again. That, and my aunt and cousin narrowly escaped similar when their home was broken into when I was even younger. No wonder what sounded and felt like an attempted break in brought up such a visceral reaction of rage.
Year 5, Day 191: Welp. I was prepared for a shitty day. Had my consolation danish ready to go when I emerged from the first, second, or third hyperfocus sessions. Instead we woke up to a feverish Smol Acrobat declaring “I’m going to stay home wif you and Wee because I do not feel good! Not Daddy. Oh wait, yes Daddy.”
Oh.
Well. Shit.
PiC rescheduled his meetings, my truckload of work is not negotiable, and we split 80/20 kidcare and muddled through the day. I did a lot of the cuddling, which got Smol through their rough bits and was terrible for my currently already impacted immune system that’s just struggling to get past last week’s cold-type viral thing, but that was most of my 20%. I was wilting with fatigue and general ick by 3 pm, desperate for a nap.
It wasn’t until I sat down after bedtime that I came anywhere near hyperfocus again. Frustrating but got just close enough to put a decent amount of work to bed. I gave myself a few minutes with the latest posts at Ilona Andrews and The Struggle feels so familiar to my overall work right now. I got some unbelievably disheartening updates today and just wanted to quit on the spot. I hope the information is half baked and mostly wrong because if even half of it is true, life will be impossible in six months. Just sheer impossible.
Year 5, Day 192: The kids had their dental cleaning today. They love their dentist, or the dentist experience because they get to watch TV and get goodies at the end, and their hygienist and dentist are pretty great. However. Next year, the dentist is going out of network in the way that means they will still bill insurance on our behalf for our reimbursement but we have to pay the full freight and get a portion of it back later. Another expense AND another thing to keep track of. 😫
Speaking of overstretching: between my still feeling under the weather and Smol Acrobat’s fevers this week, I’m SO grateful on one point. When PiC and JB were rear-ended on the weekend, it was minor enough that we decided it was unnecessary to report to the insurance. We didn’t want to – the driver who hit them was clearly distressed about the prospect and it would have impacted his insurance much worse than it would have impacted us financially. Apparently his foot slipped off the brakes and the car rolled into ours.
Year 5, Day 193: Some days you struggle with getting the kids to see and do the chores, some days you break up fights over which chores they get to do. These are weird extremes.
Coffee grinding is the Chore of Choice. JB has been doing it on their own for about 6-8 months and now Smol Acrobat is grumpy because they’re not allowed to do it yet. “I do good wistening!” they protest. Yes, you do good listening for a 3 year old. This needs a 6 year old good listener. They grumbled but agreed to spectate only. Then we had to holler at JB to pay attention because they got distracted playing with Smol Acrobat. 🤦🏻♀️
JB is currently going through a bunch of playground conflict with their same gender friends. We were so hopeful for less conflict this year with newer kids in the mix but then BullyKid from 2nd grade joined the group. Their other gender friend also had a conflict and split with their same gender friends. I don’t know for sure if 2ndgrade Bully is the instigator but given there were no conflicts for many weeks before they joined, and the conflicts immediately started when they joined, I have my suspicions.
Year 5, Day 194: “The great love of my life is a homicidal maniac. No one’s perfect.” I really liked the premise of Lucy Liu’s Elementary when it first came out but never got to see much of it. Now that it’s on Netflix, I get to enjoy it as my background noise. I like it!
Good news, JB and the other kids apparently mended bridges. I wasn’t sure which way that was going to go. That’s a bit of a relief but I expect the larger issues with the conflict-provocateur remain.
Money: If you use any of the listed P&G brands, they have holiday and sports-related rebates: Get $15 when you spend $50 and Get $5 when you spend $20, good from Sept 29-Dec 29 2024.
My exciting Friday night: working until I had to make dinner, cooking dinner and getting everyone else off to bed, and then doing tutoring prep (scanning pages out of JB’s math book for their uncle professor to use) and then researching and predicting preventative healthcare costs for 2025 so we can make open enrollment decisions next week. The dental bit is the most painful. They say they’ll pay 90% of “reasonable and customary fees” but I need to know what that means in order to figure out how much of that 90% stacks up to my dentist’s costs and therefore what our anticipated OOP costs will likely be. Only I can’t because according to the ADA: the words usual, customary and reasonable are not interchangeable and UCR is a misleading acronym.
UCR is actually three different concepts, not one. Usual fees are determined by the dentist. The fee the insurance company determines to be customary may be lower than the area dentists’ usual or reasonable fees for the same service. There is no universally accepted method for determining the customary fee schedule, which may vary a great deal among plans, even when those plans operate in the same area. So, the benefit paid will generally be based on a percentage of the insurance company’s customary fee schedule. Patients often do not know what their out-of-pocket costs will be because third-party payers generally do not release these customary fee schedule maximums to the public.
That’s VERY ANNOYING.
SIGH.
Anyway, I worked out most of our expected fees because the hygienist helped me schedule all of their appointments for next year in one go, so at least I have that information to go on. I think I’ve wrapped my head around this: they cover 100% preventative care at their discounted rates so the other percentages of coverage for treatment don’t matter. I don’t have to wrangle with the other stuff for now because all we have planned is preventive care and we can’t predict anything else at this point. So that’s dental done for now. For my 401k, since I’m already accustomed to the accelerated rate of contributions, I may keep that percentage for the first half of the year and be done with that, similar to how we do PiC’s plan. That’ll give us better cash flow for the second half of the year and ensure we’ve maxed it out a second time before dreams of rage-quitting start up again. Hopefully.
We went to an out-of-network dentist for LO’s first visit, and it was $$$ when we got xrays and such, but they did file the paperwork for us at least. We have deltadental which is apparently terrible and lots of places reject it due to low payouts. We switched LO to in-network.
Insurance is so frustrating. The US health care system is so frustrating. We just went in a big circle about why LO’s generic prescription was being charged at the brand-name price, and they had the nerve to say something like, “Actually, $35 is a good deal because without insurance, it was $195”. The same thing we bought in France for about $5 or $10 with no insurance. Anyway, apparently there is such thing as an “authorized generic” in which the original company still controls pricing and insurance doesn’t count it as a generic.
Hope the little ones in your house are back to healthy!
The one year I did the HSA and high deductible healthcare, I had the same sort of experience. I am so very much not looking forward to figuring it out for dental. I’ve never seen another dental insurance provider other than Delta, I wondered if they had a monopoly. We really like our dentist, but I’m not sure if it’s worth an extra $1000 a year 😞
US healthcare overall is SO ridiculous!