Healthcare Payment Incidents
I've found myself in the odd situation of having to write checks recently for healthcare-related expenses, of all things. To show how infrequently I have written checks, I've moved 6 times since my last checks were printed. For some time, I've automated nearly all periodic expenses: rent, utilities, insurance, credit card, etc. It's more unusual to write a check. My WV landlady had no Internet portal and required checks; I usually end up writing checks for things like apartment security deposits, gifts to relatives, etc.
Paying My Hospital Doctor's Fee
My first issue dealt with my physician's fee (allocated as my responsibility from my health insurance provider). Incidentally, getting multiple invoices from the same visit is somewhat annoying. The main hospital charges process (whether against my credit card or checking account) completed as expected, but the physician's specified portal just ran into failures with misleading, incoherent error messages. Trying to reach portal tech support proved to be problematic and basically a sinkhole of my time. Finally, it was just easier to waste a stamp and a check to take care of the problem
My Initial COBRA Payment
The second one was more serious and eventually resulted in a health outpatient procedure being rescheduled (this story in part was initially discussed in my signature political blog (I have some specialty post formats, like a journal). I recently left my position (let's just say it involved some nasty office politics on the contractor side, beyond the scope of this post), and my employee insurance expired at the end of March (the diagnosis occurred weeks before I left the company). Basically I couldn't get my COBRA paperwork until then, and more importantly (and not really specified in the paperwork) the insurance company would refuse to verify coverage until they had advance payment in hand. My procedure was scheduled before mid-month.
So the hospital outpatient coordinator called to tell me that a routine insurance check showed my coverage had lapsed and they weren't about to do the surgery with the risk of not getting paid. I had maybe over the weekend at most to get this taken care of. I finally got in touch with the COBRA administrators in Wisconsin. No, they didn't have an Internet payment portal; no, they wouldn't accommodate a bank wire or any other method I could think of. I had to send a check from a delivery service, like $25 overnight Express mail. So initially after I sent the check expedited by the Post Office (and verified receipt by tracking number), they denied getting payment, then argued the check had an error on the second line (something I can't recall ever doing before; I thought I double-checked the check before mailing it). By that time I was screwed. A replacement check required another day I didn't have, and the hospital scrubbed the procedure.
I did have confirmed receipt by the original surgery date but too late. But even then it took 2-3 business days to resolve insurance status, because somehow the hospital still couldn't verify my insurance. For whatever reason, the insurance people had to send proof of health insurance to me, vs. the hospital directly (but I had to jump through hoops to download it), and even when I sent it to a supervisor point of contact at the hospital, the coordinator claimed she never got it.
Now I'm sure that there are worse horror stories than this, but I've been in other COBRA programs, e.g., 10 years ago, and didn't run into these kinds of issues. Of course, it wasn't a case where I had a procedure scheduled early in the COBRA period. The proof of insurance showed after the fact that I had coverage from the beginning of the month, including the original surgery date. I guess the hospital wasn't willing to take on the risk of my making a first premium payment.
Uber Payment Verification & Scheduling
I haven't ridden in an Uber since about 2016. I had run into a couple of issues in the North Charleston area, both involving return trips, the first involved a late flight from San Antonio, and the second was a return from the obligatory drug test from my new Arizona employer (my car was in the shop)
So in the context of my upcoming procedure described above, I won't be able to drive for a short period of time post-surgery. .Part of my concern in trying to use Uber in a distant Baltimore suburb was that credit card billing zip code had changed. Documentation from Uber pages didn't seem to dovetail with either my desktop or Android app. Trying to reenter the same credit card didn't work; I tried to delete and replace, but I didn't see a way to delete the credit card (vs. Uber help); again, I didn't see a dovetail with the documentation. Another source seemed to indicate maybe the app won't let you delete without adding another credit card. But, once again, with 2 cards; I didn't see any obvious way to select one of the cards and update/delete them.
A similar thing in terms of scheduling rides. What I experienced simply did not reflect what was documented.
[Postscript: part of this involved a round trip to downtown Baltimore over the weekend. So originally the Uber screen flashed "no drivers available" and my heart sank, but a couple of minute later it flashed a driver was maybe 10 minutes away. I was dreading the idea of someone picking up me up in congested Baltimore Saturday morning. It turned out to be the fastest pickup ever. It turns out he just dropped off somebody. I noticed his car wasn't moving on Uber; they had identified a green Toyota. And there was a parked green Toyota to my right with just a driver. I poked my head in the window and asked if he was looking for me; I could see my given name on his cellphone.]
VPN Issues
I use a VPN provider for obvious reasons. Among other things, I didn't want to expose my connections on insecure hot spots in airports and hotels But there are a couple of annoying issues I've noticed while my VPN software is running:- I found that my outgoing gmail emails from the Thunderbird client will fail.
- Multiple secure websites will notice your implicit usage (through VPN) of a different IP and will challenge your connection, e.g., by asking for a previously specified security question and/or a code sent to your email or smartphone. You may be asked if you use this computer frequently.
Some Application Annoyances
I have some 5 PC's and a Chromebook (3 of them were/are backup computers which had failed to start at some point). So basically I have multiple external drives with current backups and some thumb drives with portable applications, which would allow rapid transition/recoveryauk in the event of my workhorse computer fails.-Part of my strategy is making use of browser sync functionality. At some point several weeks back, I noticed some divergences; bookmarks and extensions were not carrying between my workhorse and most used backup computer (the old workhorse). I had tried checking setups which for a long time looked like:
At some point Chrome transitioned to a series of toggle switches via vertical ellipsis, settings, sync and Google services, manage sync; now my account was displaying a syncing status; what I discovered today was for some odd reason (which I don't recall doing), all the sync settings were turned OFF. Once I toggled them back on, I quickly saw the bookmarks sync across PC's and chromebook, and adjustments on my workhorse system quickly propagated across devices.
There are a couple of key annoyances with my Thunderbird client. (beyond the long launch time). One is these pop-ups that occasionally stubbornly refuse to close (and if you try, often causes Thunderbird to crash. Another pet peeve is I don't like the message preview option. I think this may be a default because they want to solicit donations on related space. So you often have to toggle off message pane via View/Layout/Message Pane (or F8). Occasionally you have to toggle the message pane on in order to toggle it off.
