I Apply for Medicare, Part II

     The other day I received an envelope in the mail from the Social Security Administration. I opened it up. I got my Medicare card!

     I feel like I've been accepted into an exclusive club. Better than AAA; better than AARP; better than my America the Beautiful senior pass to the National Parks.

     Now, if I only knew what Medicare covers. And what other medical coverage I should get.

     I went through one round of trying to figure out how Medicare works, apart from Parts A and B, as I recounted in I Apply for Medicare, Part I. I did learn some information; but not enough to make me think I could find an appropriate backup plan.

     So I phoned my sister. She's older than I am and has been on Medicare for a couple of years -- and I know she's used the system, so I thought I could ask her how it works.

     "You haven't gotten any information in the mail?" she said, incredulously. "I think I got several mailings. But to tell you the truth, I wasn't paying attention." She knew she was going on her husband's medical plan to supplement Medicare. It's a good plan and, as she said, "It's almost free," and so she didn't research other options. Some people are lucky. And she was happy getting whatever she would get.

     My ex-wife had mentioned that she'd gone to an insurance agent specializing in Medicare plans. The agent had assessed her situation, come up with several options for her and explained the details of both coverage and cost. I googled Medicare insurance agents in my town. The nearest one is a 40-minute drive. Maybe I'd go see him, I said to myself, but let me try to figure this out on my own. I really didn't want to have to drive that far, on speculation that the agent would know what he was talking about, and know what would be best for me.

     Of course, I'd neglected to ask my ex-wife what plan she'd decided on. So I called her back. She told me she's using a United Health Care plan she got through AARP. That was the one recommended to her by her agent; and so far it was working just fine.

     Meanwhile, I'd received two thick envelopes from my own insurance company. I opened them up; and the contents were both intimidating, and discouraging. Oh man, I really didn't want to read all that mumbo jumbo!

     Nevertheless, I gamely opened up the package and started to read through the material. There were several HMO plans. But I want to reserve the option to go to a doctor outside my network, in case I ever need a certain specialist. So I turned to the PPO plans.

     I tried to compare PPO I and PPO II and PPO III and PPO "High Option." I focused on PPO II and PPO III, figuring I didn't want either the cheapest or the most expensive plan. But it looked to me, as I inspected the columns of benefits, that PPO III is more expensive but offers fewer benefits. That couldn't possibly be right. So I threw up my hands and gave up. For the moment, anyway. I knew I'd have to go back to it.

     Then I thought, I should contact AARP. If it was good enough for my ex-wife, it would probably be good enough for me,

     I went to the AARP website. After searching through the site (the insurance plans are hard to find) I found a reference to several AARP Supplemental plans. And I also found a recommendation for Medicare Advantage plan. What's the difference between Medicare Supplement, and Medicare Advantage? I didn't know. I'd also seen reference to Medicare Gap plans. What are they?

     I decided to call the 800 number. I then spent about 45 minutes on the phone with a woman who explained all about the AARP Medicare Advantage plan that was available in my area. There are several advantages, she explained. It takes the place of Medicare Part C. It includes the Part D drug plan and some dental insurance and some other ancillary benefits.

     Then she finally allowed as how the Medicare Advantage plan is an HMO plan. "Oh," I said. "That means I have to stay in a network?"

     "Yes, that's right. But we have a lot of doctors in the network."

     "Wait a second," I said, as it finally dawned on me. "Are all Medicare Advantage plans HMO plans?"

     "Yes, that's right."

     "So how can I tell if my medical group accepts this AARP Medical Advantage plan?"

     "Oh, I can look it up for you."

     So she put me on hold for a minute. She came back on the line. It turns out my medical group accepts several other United Health Care options. But not this United Health Care Medical Advantage plan. So unless I changed to another doctor in their network, every time I went to the doctor it would be out of network, costing me a fortune.

     Were there any other options available to me? I wondered. What about that AARP Supplemental plan I saw on another page of the website?

     "Oh, I don't handle those plans," said the woman. "They're administered through someone else."

     So . . . 45 minutes down the drain. But at least I learned that a Medical Advantage plan is an HMO plan, requiring you to go to doctors in their network.

     I was drained. No more research today. I quit . . . knowing no more than I knew before -- which is that it is easy to sign up for Medicare, but hard to find out exactly what you're signing up for. But I will figure it out, for sure, for my third and final installment of how I applied for Medicare, coming up (hopefully) next week.

    

Do We Spoil Our Kids?

     I just read an article Spoiled Rotten: Why Do Kids Rule the Roost? an essay about how we as parents are not asking enough of our children -- we don't require them to do chores; we buy them too many things; we keep enabling their dependence until they're well into their 20s and beyond.

     I might have dismissed the piece as a typical rant from a crotchety conservative complaining about how our kids have it too easy and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.

     Except the reason I saw the article was because a young friend of mine posted it on his Facebook page. He's no conservative. He's in his mid-30s, and happens to be the principal of a high school in New Jersey.

     Plus, the article was published in the liberal magazine The New Yorker, authored by a liberal woman known mostly for reporting on the evils of carbon emissions and their effects on global warming, and who has taken President Obama to task for being too easy on regulating coal-burning electric companies and SUV-producing automobile companies.

     The writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, contrasts a family living in the Peruvian Amazon with middle-class families living in Los Angeles. The kids in Peru help cook, help clean up, and in general make themselves useful to everyday family endeavors. Even six-year-olds are beginning to learn adult responsibilities.

     In L.A. the parents beg their children to do simple chores or take basic hygiene measures, and the kids either refuse to do the job, or just ignore the parents -- and the end result is that the parents end up waiting on the kids.

     Kolbert concludes, "With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world."

     Why is it, she asks, that Peruvian children help their families more than American children do? And why do American parents help their children at home more than the Peruvian parents do?

      And why is it that so many American kids, after four years of college and a couple of years either working or going to graduate school, end up moving back home, then sleeping late, eating mom's cooking, and making only feeble attempts to find a new job?

     Some of the blame can be laid on a poor economy and the difficulty in finding a job . . . and the pressure on younger children not to help out the family, but to do their homework, engage in extracurricular activities and get into a good college . . . so they can get a good job and don't end up back in their parents basement when they're in their 20s.

     But I wonder how much the world that Elizabeth Kolbert describes squares with your view of your own children, and maybe your grandchildren.

     I look at my own daughter (college class of 2005) and her friends, and I can't think of one of them who moved back home. They are all working, getting married, carrying on with their lives. I look at my son (college class of 2008) or B's son (college class of 2009), and I see many more instances of kids having difficulties landing a job, finding an apartment, and in general launching their lives. This, no doubt, is a result of the Great Recession and its aftereffects.

    But as for Kolbert's description of kids who act entitled to every latest toy, who will not help at home, who will not even help themselves ... it seems to me she's presenting a cartoonish version of the real day-to-day ebb and flow of teaching kids about adult responsibilities and relationships. Sure, kids are reluctant helpers. But they do learn, eventually, don't they?

     But then I wonder:  my friend the high-school principal. How come he found the article so relevant he posted it on his Facebook page?

    

Remember Her?

     There is a dormitory named after her at Purdue University. In 2007, the U. S. Navy named a cargo ship for her. There's a dam named after her on the Mystic River in Massachusetts, and a bridge that crosses the Mississippi at Atchison, Kansas.

     Several schools in California are named in her honor. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver inducted her into the California Hall of Fame in 2006. And several movies have been made of her life and times.

Bridge across the Mississippi

     Who is she? She wrote several bestselling books; worked for a time at Cosmopolitan magazine; and was an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

     She came from a wealthy but troubled family. As a young girl she lived at her maternal grandparents' house in Atchison. Her grandfather was a judge, then became president of a savings bank. Her father was a lawyer.

     She was her parents' second child -- the first one died in childbirth -- and when she was two years old she was joined by a younger sister. She and her sister, nicknamed Pidge, were both tomboys. The two girls were home-schooled first by their mother, then by a governess.

     When she was ten years old, her father took a new job with a railroad. Her parents moved to Des Moines, Iowa, and left the two girls behind at their grandparents' house. Two years later, the girls joined their parents in Des Moines, and for the first time they attended a regular public school.

     The father was eventually discovered to be an alcoholic. He lost his job, underwent some treatment and eventually found work in St. Paul, Minn. This time the parents took their girls with them. But the parents soon separated, and the girls moved to Chicago with their mother.

     The older sister graduated from Hyde Park High School and went to a junior college in Pennsylvania. During Christmas vacation she visited a relative in Toronto, where she saw soldiers returning from war. She decided to train as a nurse and began working in a Toronto military hospital.

     She caught pneumonia and sinusitis, a condition that plagued her for the rest of her life -- especially when, a few years later, she started a new career. She spent about a year convalescing, part of the time with her sister in Massachusetts, then moved to New York City to further her medical career. But she didn't last long in New York, and soon moved to California, where her parents had reunited and were now living.

     The turning point in her life occurred in December 1920, when her father took her to a local airfield and she took her first ride in an airplane. "By the time I had gotten two or three hundred feet off the ground," she later reflected, "I knew I had to fly."

     She took her first flying lesson in January 1921 at Kinner Field near Long Beach. In order to reach the field she had to ride the bus to the end of the line, then walk four miles to the airfield. She cropped her hair short, in the style of other pioneer female fliers. And six months later she bought a used Kinner Airster biplane. On Oct. 22, 1922 she piloted the plane up to 14,000 feet -- then a record for any female pilot.

     Are you getting a sense of who she was? In 1924, after her parents finally got a divorce, she flew with her mother from California to Boston. She settled down in the Boston area, flying out of Quincy, Mass., working as a sales representative for Kinner aircraft and writing newspaper columns (and later for Cosmo) promoting flying.

     After Charles Lindbergh flew to Europe in 1927, a group of aviation enthusiasts became interested in sending a woman across the Atlantic. They called Amelia Earhart.

     The project coordinators, including George P. Putnam, a wealthy publisher and promoter, recruited a crew of three people to make the trip. The trio departed on June 17, 1928 and landed in England a little over 20 hours later. Amelia Earhart did not pilot the plane. When asked about her role in the cockpit, she scoffed, "I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes." Then she added, "Maybe someday I'll try it alone."

     After she returned home, she became a celebrity, thanks largely to the efforts of George Putnam, who she married in 1931. And in 1932 she fulfilled her ambition -- she became the first woman to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic.

     Amelia Earhart went on to set several speed and distance flying records -- she was the first person to fly solo from Honolulu to California, to fly from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to New York.

     Then in 1937 she set out to circumnavigate the globe. In March she took off from Oakland, Calif., and flew to Honolulu. But there was an accident on take-off from Honolulu. The plane was damaged, and the trip was cancelled.

     Her second attempt came less than three months later, but this time, because of a change in wind patterns, she headed east, from Oakland to Miami, accompanied by navigator Fred Noonan.

     The duo departed Miami on June 1. They stopped in South America, Africa, India and Southeast Asia, arriving at Lae, New Guinea on June 29, 1937. They had flown about 22,000 miles, with 7,000 to go.

     What happened after they took off from Lae, on July 2, bound for Howland Island in the Pacific, has forever been a mystery. They got about 800 miles into the flight; they were low on fuel; radio contact sputtered, then they lost contact.

     Search efforts began only an hour after the last radio transmissions were received. Ships and airplanes crisscrossed the area for more than two weeks, but no physical evidence of Earhart, Noonan or their airplane was found. Subsequently, husband George Putnam launched a private search effort, to no avail. Amelia Earhart was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939.

     Of course we all know that wasn't the end of it, as theories abounded about what happened to the famous female flier, and people are still fascinated even today, 76 years later. The most logical explanation is that the plane ran out of fuel, crashed, and sank without a trace, killing the two fliers. But some researchers believe the duo made it to uninhabited Gardiner Island (now Nikumaroro Island), where they landed safely and survived for some unspecified period of time -- lost to the world like Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

     Still others believe that Earhart, who was a friend to Eleanor Roosevelt and knew the president, was spying on war-mongering Japan. They hypothesize that she was captured by the Japanese and met her demise on Saipan Island. An early movie starring Rosalind Russell followed this storyline back in 1943. The latest to advance the theory is Mike Campbell, who published Amelia Earhart: The Truth at Last in 2012.

     There was no paucity of other rumors as well. She supposedly took a turn as Tokyo Rose, broadcasting propaganda messages during World War II. She somehow made it home and lived out her life undercover, as a banker in New Jersey.

     Your guess is as good as mine . . . unless you have some inside information? But we sure do remember her, and probably will for as long as it takes to find a definitive, conclusive answer to the 20th century's most enduring mystery.

Wage Discrimination

    The latest figures I've seen show that a woman earns somewhere between 77 cents and 91 cents for every dollar that her male counterpart makes in a similar job. Why the wide range of estimates? Some studies adjust for educational level, job experience, and years in the workforce; others do not.

     This is a problem in itself, because we all (I assume) believe in equal pay for equal work.

     But, women, be careful what you ask for. In my demographic there are a lot of disparities. I know five or six couples, in their late 50s to early 60s, where the man held the primary job for 20 or 30 years. Then he got laid off, while the wife was either going back to school, or starting a new job, or stepping up her career after the kids went off to college.

     These men are now working freelance, or "consulting." or in one case working behind the checkout counter at our local supermarket. In this substrata of the American populace, the women are earning somewhere between $2 and $10 for every dollar that the man earns.

     Does this counter-trend make the overall numbers seem more equitable? I doubt it.

     Now I don't mean to make light of the above figures. There is definitely something wrong with our economy. But, truthfully, that's not what prompted this post. Instead, it's another economic disparity -- a figure I saw in The New Republic:  "The average American spends an estimated $144 celebrating Mother's Day, but only an average of $82 commemorating Father's Day."

     Of course, some might argue that mother and father are not comparable jobs. Regardless, all I have to say about it is this:  My kids owe me $82!*

     *Okay, to be fair, my daughter phoned me from Colorado -- long distance, no less -- but that doesn't even cost a dime anymore. And my son came to visit . . . do I count his mileage?
    

Is Your Microwave Safe: One Week Later

     Last Friday I began my microwave experiment -- see Is Your Microwave Safe? -- to try to settle the question of whether microwaved water will kill a plant -- and, by extension, whether a microwave is safe to use in cooking or reheating food.

     The background:  About ten days ago, a Facebook friend of mine posted an item about a secondary school student who performed an experiment for a science fair. She took two identical plants. She watered one with water she heated to boiling in a pan on the stove, then let cool. She watered the other with water heated in the microwave, and then let cool. After nine days, the plant getting the microwaved water was dead. The other plant was thriving.

     I'm trying to replicate her experiment. My two plants have been watered twice in the past week -- the one in the gray pot receiving the microwaved water. But so far, seven days later, they don't look any different. Do they?

     You might notice I switched the location of the two plants. I will switch them back and forth at every watering, just to make sure that the placement doesn't make a difference. I'll update again in another week. But meantime . . . I feel safe drinking my reheated coffee.