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Powerful waits in a covid stew Tuesday, January 4 2022
Powerful has been recovering nicely over the past week or so, but only after his parvo was diagnosed and he was given a blood transfusion. To permanently treat the underlying parvo, originally it was thought that he could go to the Kingston hospital over a series of days for treatment sessions, whatever those entail. But then Medicaid (Powerful's insurer) refused to pay for sessions at the Kingston hospital, actually alleging that he'd already received this treatment (which is totally not true). I don't know what would've happened to Powerful had that been the end of the matter. Without treatment, there was a chance the parvo would recur and then he'd need more blood transfusions, perhaps on an ongoing basis. Was this a cost-effective risk for Medicaid to be taking? I don't know, but it's in keeping with all the other Dunning-Kruger madness overrunning the country.
Since Powerful is a heart transplant recipient, there's a lot of sunk cost in his current state of health, and one would imagine parvo treatments to be a relatively minor additional expense. Down at Westchester Medical Center (where his heart transplant was performed), Powerful's doctor had to come up with a workaround so that Powerful could receive treatments for parvo that would be disguised as heart-related procedures. Unfortunately, this meant that the treatments would have to be done at Westchester as an emergency procedure, not in Kingston via appointments. For this reason Gretchen had to get up before 8:00am this morning to drive him down there. And, since we're in the middle of another covid wave fueled by the Omicron variant, Powerful found himself waiting for hours in a hospital emergency room, surrounded mostly by people presumably there due to covid. Sure, he was wearing a KN95 mask, but stewing in that broth with a compromised immune system would not be what anyone with any sense would advise. And yet, due to bureaucratic stupidity, that was what he had to do. Fortunately, Gretchen didn't have to wait with him. She dropped him off and then immediately drove back home. Instead of being an outpatient going to a nearby hospital for a few days for a few hours, Powerful would now be an inpatient at the futher-away Westchester, spending at least three days there to have his parvo treated. And Medicaid would now be paying that much higher cost instead of what they otherwise could've paid. Things like this are one of many reasons why fully socialized medicine ends up being cheaper.
In the remote workplace, the pressure was off with the tax imports, so I could focus on things like getting my asecular.com email to forward to Gmail (which was mostly about implementing a Gmail whitelist) and taking the first steps at rooting my Samasung Galaxy A12 phone (in hopes that I could eventually get it working on my employer's VPN).
This evening Gretchen roasted some cabbage and served it with chickpeas and tomatoes. It was kind of bland and the vegan yoghurt I tried on it had a flavor I didn't much like.
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