Tribulations. That’s what’s kept me away from this blog since…erm…some time.

I am responsible for handling my elderly mother’s financial matters. It fell on me, as the only child living here, though my father did everything he could to make sure the passage from his hands to mine would be smooth and stress-free.

Yeah.

He organized everything as best he could with the limited eyesight he had left.

He paid for a funeral, though we never did locate the proof he’d given the funeral director a check for $5000. When he died, we had to pay everything, which, because my Dad was a meticulous and money-wise guy, was no burden on my mother.

Odd how we are told to retain records seven years in case the Internal Revenue wants to squeeze us one last time. That always was my understanding anyway.

Yet my Mom and Dad’s bank retains records five years, which proved to be a few months after the check my Dad thought he’d written to the funeral director was written. My brother and sisters, when they visited, helped me by going through the piles of paper and checks trying to find anything that proved the case. Nothing.

Then, in the stress of my Dad’s passing, I retired. Not connected, just coincidental.

In the jumble of papers regarding my retirement, I was receiving another jumble from various insurance companies requesting proof that my Dad was dead.

I put it bluntly. They had verification from Social Security that he was off the list because of death or I wouldn’t have heard from them. I learned this later when a couple annuities I didn’t know about sent out letters saying my mother had to respond to the request for proof of her relationship to Dad and of his death, in the form of yet another death certificate ($6.00 per copy) from the State of Nebraska, proving what we barely had time to absorb: Dad is dead.

Assholes.

Yeah, yeah! Insurance fraud is a big deal, and it increases the cost of insurance. Blah-blah-blah.

“Just give her the f’ing money!” I’d scream at the walls as I tried to pull together all the signatures and paperwork required for Mom to get what was HER money, not the damn insurance companies’.

Of course, the more circuitous the path, the more vulnerable the people involved in trying to retrieve necessary money from these bandits, the longer the insurance companies had the money to make money through their investments. How’s that for insurance fraud!

Yeah, yeah! It’s money made legally. It just has a taint of immorality about it, the stench of blackened corporate souls. Oh. Corporations don’t have souls. Right! So they can do anything the SEC or whatever agency regulates their business deems OK- until the whole rotten pile falls, and the world has fallen into an economic collapse, such as we saw in other parts of the economy in the past couple, three years. Don’t let me get started!

I finally (I think) managed to stumble my way through Mom’s insurance and care center payment issues (all the time dealing with a major one of my own), barely closing the door on the hungry wolves of the billing department of the care center where she lives.

She’s allowed to keep $4000 in assets under the rules of Medicaid. Her application wouldn’t go through until I could establish for the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services that two annuities she receives money from are for her life, that nothing will be there to inherit.

By the time the insurance companies coughed up the information needed, weeks after the request, I had to pay Mom’s January health care bill of $6343.61 or the billing department was going to get rough, really rough with me. That also took her below $4000 in assets, something I was told not to let happen.

What was I to do? They won’t throw Mom out on the street, but I apparently am the “guarantor”, which I take to mean, “The person who will end up f’ed if the money isn’t turned over. NOW!”

(Gad, don’t you wonder if the people in the upper 10% have to grovel and suffer these indignities in their own way, or do they just pay someone to grovel and suffer indignities for them. I feel more like a socialist the older I get, the closer my association with people with financial and political power.)

Oh, yes, the billing department of the care center also wanted their money for February, though I’d told them the application for Medicaid was in process. They sent me a letter. Blah-blah-blah…. I call this sort of letter a “…then we hold your children hostage and kill your dog” letter.

Very sensitive. Yeah.

I called Mom’s caseworker at Health and Human Services about the application. Seems Mom’s bank changed the rules about how outside agencies such as HHS had to request financial information, so the request had to be resubmitted using the new form, I suppose. It’s always paper in this litigious country, the United States of America. If it isn’t a new form, it is an old form: those yummy pieces of paper with Founding Fathers and dead Presidents on them.

As Judge Judy says, if you want to find the bad guys, follow the money trail. That’s a paraphrase, but how true.

It so happened that Mom’s caseworker received several of the new applications back from the bank that morning. Mom’s was with them. She quickly resolved the matter, allowed for payment of Mom’s care center bill back to January, sent me the verification, answered a question or two for billing at the care center, and Mom was once again a welcome part of the residents, not some piece of refuse to be bartered over. Bastards.

Postscript. My Dad lived in the care center from the end of August 2004 until his death on Election Day, November 4, 2008. Every penny of his care came from funds and savings he and Mom put together in their working and early retirement years. Mom went into the care center in November of 2007. Until October of 2009, all her expenses were paid by her and Dad’s hard work and smart investing. Medicaid paid from October 2009 until October 2010 (I think…too tired at this point to verify.)

I detailed in another blog how an annuity I was unaware of and a clerical error at Blue Cross Blue Shield Nebraska (they continued to take a premium payment for a dead man’s health care insurance for two years…because they hadn’t attached a Social Security Number to his account that would have flagged it when they got a roster of the newly deceased removed from Social Security), and the nightmare that was to resolve. The money from these two accounts paid Mom’s care center bill for three, maybe four months after I told Health and Human Services about them so they could stop the help they gave.

All of those months at almost $5000 to a little over $5000 for Dad at the first to almost $6000 to slightly over $6000 add up. When both were in there together, they paid over $10,000 a month for both. They bought a wing to that care center! No kidding. They spent over $300,000 of their own resources to occupy a double room (Dad, though the last year his roommate was Mom) or a single (Mom, after Dad died and we decided she was going to go out in comfort one way or another).

The lady in charge of resident welfare says I should feel proud of Mom and Dad that they were able to provide for themselves this well in their last years.

Yeah. I’m trying to feel proud. I know they would have wanted to donate a nice sum of money to the church at the end of their lives. I know they wanted their children to get something from them at the end of their lives. Their children wanted them to spend their money on themselves, so the lack of an inheritance is no issue, but I still feel bad that the church won’t get anything. It was a big part of their lives.

Dad didn’t want to die in a care center or a hospital. He was content, though, once he reached a point where he was unable to do things for himself, to live there. Of course, Mom and I visited him daily and ate one or more meals a week with him. Sometimes, when we were up to it, we’d have Dad over to visit us since we were half a block away. (I had some serious health issues in 2007 that wiped out having Dad over at the apartment.)

Mom is content over there. She is waited on hand and foot. (At the charge per month, I encourage her to insist on it.) I visit her nearly every day, and we watch “Down Home with the Neelys” and “Judge Judy”, our routine.

Me? I’m trying to get past these tribulations. It is sick. I feel tainted by the issues of money and the people whose lives are centered on taking it from others. I use the Lenten season to work off grudges. More than any other Lenten season, I pray I get past the hate and resentment I have come to feel for the insurance and care center money people. It is a sickness that consumes me and leaves an empty shell.

WWJD? If I were Jesus, which I am not. What would Jesus want me to do, is a better question. It is my Lenten quest to find out.