Insurance Woes

Wow, two posts in a day!

I've needed to rant about insurance for quite some time, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Mostly the rant is about health insurance. Car insurance and Home insurance, for the most part, I don't have a problem with. Life insurance also seems okay, if not quite the investment now that it used to be.

But health insurance is another matter.

We're generally healthy, but we keep insurance against some catastrophe happening that would require extensive hospitalization. Along with that insurance comes a wide variety of services that are covered. It sounds great when you read the policy.

We're pretty picky when it comes to doctors, so it takes us a while to find a doctor we like. We'd found one in Columbus we went to once a year or two, for a physical. The doctor was in our insurance network, so we figured everything would be covered.

Wrong.

The visit to the doctor's was covered, but lab work that the doctor sent out to an out of network lab (the only lab that doctor used) was not covered. Even though that lab work was required by the in-network doctor.

We've also had doctors we liked stop taking health insurance at all, because of what the hoops the insurance companies make them go through, and the effect on the cost of services. This seems to be a growing trend.

I'd love to see some sort of change in the way health insurance works. We'd be happy if, for a fraction of what we're paying now, we could get only catastrophic health insurance. We'd gladly pay for doctor's visits, which happen infrequently and often aren't covered anyway, ourselves.

Let's hope that this becomes one of the election year issues here in the United States.

End of the Semester

It's nearing the end of the semester here, so my schedule has shifted into "hurry hurry" mode.

I'd caught up on my grading a few weeks ago, so I don't have that much of a backlog to get through, but there is some. I also have to print and copy exams, make sure that I've put review notes up, verify when all the exams are to be held, etc, etc.

Next week are the actual final exams, so I'll have a lot of grading to do then. Luckily, my exams are mostly spread out through the week, so I'll try to grade Tuesday's exam while the Wednesday crowd is taking theirs, and so on. Hopefully by the weekend I'll only have one set of exams to grade.

Grades are due Tuesday the 18th, so everything has to be done by then, regardless. No matter what, it always seems that I'm rushing around that Monday trying to put the finishing touches on grades, and last minute emails with students who aren't happy about their grade or want to make up an assignment they missed.

After Tuesday, though, the semester is officially done for me. Then I get to start preparing for the next one!