Medicare Musings And Masturbations

Are you a geezer, fairly far travelled down the great highway of life, getting your medical care subsidized by sucking off the government tit?

Then don't read this piece. It will offend you. I'll box my clown for a few minutes while you gather your things and leave.

All righty. Now that all the cotton-heads are gone, we can get down to business. And today's business is Medicare. More specifically, today's business is the cluster-fuck known as the 1-800-MEDICARE helpline. (The "Should Medicare even exist?" diatribe will have to wait for another day.)

The helpline is intended to provide information to Medicare recipients and would-be enrollees. Not necessarily specific information about their claims, mind you, but rather general information about signing up and navigating the bureaucracy.

So can someone explain to me why in the fuck the Medicare helpline operates twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, pretty much every day of the year except Christmas? I mean seriously. How many people have an urgent need in the middle of the night to find out how one signs up for Medicare?

Now, I understand that sometimes old people keep odd hours. That's one of the things that makes them annoying. Really, they should just amuse themselves by masturbating until morning. God knows they could use the jolt.

But anyway, surely they don't need a fully staffed call center - or two or three - operating in the wee hours. SURELY daytime and early evening hours would be sufficient. We can't be dealing with THAT many elderly vampires.

And it's not like the poor bastards at the call center in the off hours can do anything anyway. Pretty much every entity they might refer you to is closed. All they can do is give you phone numbers that you can call during normal business hours. They can't explain to you why your toe cruckum wasn't covered.

(As an aside, I have often been tempted to call at 2 a.m. and ask if snake-handling injuries are covered. But I'm afraid the humorless fuck on the other end of the line wouldn't get the joke.)

Besides accommodating vampires, 1-800-MEDICARE is also very good about accommodating non-English speakers. I find this rather puzzling and a bit disturbing, since I thought Medicare was for citizens, and that citizens were supposed to know how to speaka da Inglesh. But apparently not.

A hot ticket for advancement in 1-800-MEDICARE land is being bi-lingual. When I say bi-lingual, I mean knowing Spanish, because apparently knowing any second language besides that one is worthless.

(My big-titted secretary's experience with bi-lingual customer service representatives has been that their English truly sucks ass, but I have been assured that this is not the case on the Medicare helpline. You really do have your choice between mediocre English and mediocre Spanish.)

My pedantic question about the matter is this: Does it REALLY make fiscal sense to pay someone extra for working the night shift, and extra for being bi-lingual, all so there can be someone who hablas available for phone work and web chat 24/7?

Oh, did I forget to mention the web chat? It was implemented to further improve Medicare recipients' access to information and answers. As IF most Medicare recipients have a fucking clue what to do with a computer. A teen pregnancy hotline having web chat? Sure. But Medicare needs web chat like a guppy needs a mink coat.

Now, let's move on to a fellow called Dirk Diggler. That isn't his real name, obviously, but hippos or HIPAA or hypocrites or some such shit prevent me from revealing his true identity.

Anyway, Dirk is a very lonely and very loony man. He was wont to call in the middle of the night, and go off on tirades about bizarre subjects having little or nothing to do with Medicare. I wasn't privy to these calls, of course, but I can only imagine. "The microchip that the aliens that abducted me implanted in my head gave me mercury poisoning! Is reversing mercury poisoning covered under Medicare?!?!"

(Let us once again bear in mind that the graveyard shift at 1-800-MEDICARE isn't qualified to answer that question.)

Eventually, the nocturnals in receipt of those calls grew weary of Dirk's ravings, and blocked his phone number. But Dirk is not an isolated case. The Diggler family appears to be large and growing, and they represent a sizable number of the calls that come in at odd hours.

In other words, your tax dollars are going to provide warm living bodies to talk to lonely lunatics. Doesn't that make you feel all tingly and fuzzy inside?

Here's something else that will give you joy-joy feelings. The folks at 1-800-MEDICARE are deeply concerned about your privacy, even if you are a Unabomber In Training. To that end, any email that the nice customer service folks send to management when someone calls in a bomb threat has to be encrypted to protect the caller's personal health information (PHI).

Did that little piece of insanity make you spit your morning coffee and say "What in the FUCK?!?!" Yeah, me too. It's kind of nutty that they're worrying about the HIPAA rights of someone who wants to blow them up. So far as I'm concerned, you nullify your privacy rights once you express a wish to kill and maim.

And it's a waste of time, anyway. The encrypted email can't be read without the Magic Decoder Email. If you send them to the wrong destination, ol' Ted's PHI will STILL end up in the wrong hands. It will just take a little extra time to do so.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: For the most evolved species on the planet, you humans sure are stupid sometimes.

So how about instead of wasting all this money answering stupid questions from blue-hairs and whackos and no hablas, you send the money to me instead? I'll set up the 1-800-MOOSICARE hotline, and answer gynecological questions for women between the ages of eighteen and thirty. Isn't that a much better use of those hard-earned tax dollars?

No, don't thank me. It's the least I can do to give something back to those who have given me so many erections.
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