Insurance

I think maybe I'm just starting to get old.

After getting a job so that I can pay off my stiffling hospital bills and how on earth I'm going to afford a divorce on top of that, the next biggest thought in my head is what I'm going to do about losing my health insurance after the divorce. I'm in my mid-twenties, for Chrissakes. I should be worrying about shopping and drinking, maybe finishing school. Not HEALTH INSURANCE!

But I am worrying about health insurance. I currently know how much a gall bladder surgery can cost, even after your health insurance company is done haggling down the prices and paying their 80% and it is quite a fair amount. But even beyond that, I have chronic depression. I would like to someday get to a point where every little setback does not send me on a self-harm/suicide spiral. I believe that this will require not a small amount of counseling over a not small amount of time. Finding the right therapist can be hard, much less finding that right person and developing a trusting relationship with them. That requires staying on the same health plan for that period of time, or having each health plan after cover the same doctors and therapists. Even if I didn't have worries about "pre-existing conditions" that might not be covered by a new insurance after a period of not being insured, I am loathe to go back to being uninsured because I can't afford to pay out of pocket for mental health services and the only avenue available to me, the local country mental health agency, takes far too long to actually help a person. When my meds seemed to have stopped working last fall, I was told it would take three months to get into the prescribing nurse practioner. When I think about all I went through when I started a new medication, which actually made me feel worse, I dread to think what would have happened if I had to wait three months to get the medication changed. Fortunately for me, I had private health insurance at the time and a private prescribing doctor who I could get in to see within a few days for a med check-up.

Then again, all this thinking about health insurance makes me think about how we establish other forms of insurance in our life. How it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that love, relationship, and marriage are just insurance plans against loneliness, having to deal with the hardships of the world alone, never having sex again, and any number of other things that one wants to avoid and that their partner can provide. Knowing the histories of both BT and TyRoy, I can't help but wonder how much I am just insurance to them. Then again, how much are they/ have they been insurance to me as well? Fuck. Too late for this kind of thinking. Wish I didn't have to do this kind of thinking at all. Wish my marriage had just worked like it was supposed to so I could currently be heartbroken over my husband being gone and just hoping to find a job, maybe planning on doing full-time temp work just to earn enough so that I could pay the hospital bills all by myself instead of using BT's hard-earned money that he wants to use for our future. Now there is no future. Yeah, it's too fucking late to be thinking about this.