Coffee heat rising

Angst

Holy Sh!t Moments

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You know, two of my dear friends have arrived at points in middle age where their husbands are…well…annoying. And the men? They seem to have something in common.

I think that as time passes men must experience what we can best describe as holy sh!t moments.

• The kids go off to college.
• The son leaves the city, maybe even the state. Maybe even the country.
• The daughter marries. He doubts the young husband’s suitability. She doesn’t.
• The son gets a job that pays more than he, the father, ever dreamed of earning.
• The daughter gets a job that pays more than he ever dreamed of earning.
• He looks at his wife and realizes she looks younger than he does.
• He goes to his 25th high-school reunion and fails to recognize the girl who had that crush on him all through senior year. He figures it’s not his fault she put on all that weight.
• He looks down at his feet and realizes he no longer can see his dong past his belly.
• The daughter has two kids. He begins to appreciate the son-in-law: at least he’s brighter than the other set of grandparents. Grandparents?
• He needs dorkish-looking glasses from the drugstore to see to read the computer.
• He arrives at the age when his father died.
• His doctor prescribes blood-pressure pills for him.
• He’s working 18-hour days at a job that no longer fires him up the way it once did.
• His doctor prescribes cholesterol pills, and adds that it would be wise to take a baby aspirin each morning.
• He realizes he’s going to have to retire pretty soon.
• He and the wife keep getting notices from the Social Security administration going on about how much they’ll be entitled to, one of these days.
• His wife says his inability to hear the female voice is no longer selective deafness. His annoying doctor agrees and sends him to get hearing aids.
• His sciatica hurts. Most of the time.
• He retires. Now what? Old age is no country for young men!

Well. Into each life some holy sh!t moments must fall. Women probably expect them because we anticipate menopause and see it coming, long before seniority and retirement arrive. Except for a spreading waistline, thinning hair, and maybe having to listen to their wives complain about mid-life changes, men have no sharply delineating physical manifestation to serve as a stepping-stone to full maturity. It’s like not noticing the force-field that surrounds the solar system before running your spaceship right into it.

We’re told men are as likely to experience depression as women — this insight is presented as a news flash! And now it is revealed: men’s depressive symptoms can include “anger attacks, aggression or irritability, substance abuse, risk-taking behavior and hyperactivity.” No kidding?

Much more dire, we learn that veterans, largely  men, are committing suicide at the rate of 22 a day. That’s one self-inflicted death every 65 minutes!

A returning war veteran has a whole set of difficult issues to handle that don’t apply to ordinary working stiffs — although it should be noted that almost 70 percent of suicides among veterans have been men aged 50 and older; most of them, one might guess, back in the country long enough to readjust to civilian life. And retirement is a particularly difficult holy sh!t moment, when a man and a woman who, most of the time, have spent at least 12 hours a day apart, suddenly find themselves facing 24 long hours a day together. Think of it: twenty-four hours a day with a person who no longer looks, thinks, or acts like the one you married and who’s richly accustomed to ruling his or her own domain.

If you weren’t already depressed, that prospect will do it!

What can people — whether male or female — do to forestall or at least ease the depression that naturally must follow from one too many holy sh!t moments?

One strategy might be to avoid going to high-school reunions… 😉

Another — probably more effective — is to try to anticipate, to the extent possible, what sources of angst might afflict us in the normal course of life. For example, it’s pretty obvious that various health problems will arise with age. Some of them can be delayed or avoided fairly simply:

• Quit smoking
• Limit drinking
• Avoid recreational drug use
• Eat healthy foods, by and large
• Get regular exercise

Harder to conceive is the likelihood that one day you’ll have to spend most of your time in the company of your spouse. To make that transition more or less smoothly, both partners will need to work at the relationship over the years. When my son was an infant, a pediatrician remarked to me and my husband that the pair — man and woman — is more important than the parent/child dynamic because the kid will grow up and leave, while the parents will have to spend the rest of their lives together. He advised keeping that in mind over the years. Among the many things you can do to keep sight of that fact:

• Spend time together one-on-one — as a regular thing.
• Develop common interests that don’t necessarily include the kids.
• Build interests with the kids that can continue happily once the offspring grow up and go away.
• Create a social life independent of the office and of child-rearing.
• Commit yourselves, as a couple, to volunteer activities that can continue all your lives.
• Enjoy a sport or activity together, one that you can reasonably expect to continue into your older years — such as hiking, fishing, or golf.
• Also develop interests in things you can do separately, so that when the time comes you’ll have a handy reason to spend some time away from each other.
• Don’t be afraid to take separate vacations now and again.

Men I’ve known have reported they found losing a job or retiring deeply depressing because they so identify themselves with their work that without that work, they felt, as one man said, “worthless.” A way to avoid that sense of loss — of value, of personal identity — is to start building a side gig some years before retirement actually descends on you.

A friend of mine, for example, expanded his interest in metal-working into gun-smithing. He started taking courses in the art of gun-smithing and, in an informal way, began working on friends’ hunting weapons. Recently he established a small corporation, and, as retirement looms, he plans to turn this enterprise into a going business. He’ll be doing something he enjoys — an outgrowth of a hobby — and he’ll earn enough extra income to make himself feel that he’s still got an edge…one that gives him a sense of “worth.”

These represent just a small sampling of the possible depression-avoidance strategies that might help any of us keep a grip. Most of them require some advance planning, though: recognizing that anyone can suffer depression — that it may even be a normal part of life, which truly is infested with holy sh!t moments — and starting early to build structures to help defuse sadness, exhaustion, or frustration.

What strategies to you use to maintain your equilibrium as you journey through your life?

 

Things You Should Know About…and a Song for George

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Let’s start with something truly wonderful: Kimisho Ishizaka’s amazing open-source Goldberg Variations. You can hear this exquisite music of Bach, download and follow along in the scores(!), and even listen on your favorite mobile devices…all for free.

Moving on to the Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted, I’m sure you read about the replicator hamburger science is trying to foist on us. Yuch. If I hadn’t already adopted the “less meat but much better meat” scheme, this one would have done the trick. The day the butcher counter starts peddling fake meat is the day I turn into a vegan. If you didn’t already have some doubts about the fake food and the chemical-laced setting in which it is served up to us, contemplate the fact that animals in the wild, domesticated animals, and lab animals in strictly controlled environments are getting fatter and fatter, just like us.

Then we have this: if you haven’t read it, you should. And while enjoying that tour de force of investigative journalism, bear something in mind: when someone else’s rights are violated, so are yours. What we see there is an unjust law — if not unconstitutional then certainly in direct contravention of the spirit of the U.S. Constitution — taken to its natural end by blatant official corruption.

Also in the Department of Unconstitutionality, we have the news that not one but two e-mail encrypting services have been shut down, one of them apparently as a direct result of secret government action and the other because its management is flat-out scared sh!tless. Big Brother is determined to read over your shoulder, whether you like it or not.

Ve haff vays of making you show us your mail…

And, my dears, if you’re not scared sh!tless, too, you have the nerves of an old oak fencepost.

While you’re contemplating these things, consider the actions of a man whose actions in the office to which we elected him directly contradict what he promised to do while he was talking us into voting for hm.

And speaking of the frightful aspects of America’s Brave New World, we see that someone somewhere would like to take some action to improve mental health care in this country, given the number of unhappy souls who have taken to the streets, the cinemas, and the schools with heavy armaments. Sounds hopeful, doesn’t it?

But what, really, does it mean? Given the state of organizations, private as well as public, that institutionalize the vulnerable, what really will be the outcome of this? Maybe a new rug under which to sweep sick people? How much hope do you hold out that we’ll do a decent job of reforming mental health care?

Along those lines, we have this little bit of double-think, which would be hilarious if it weren’t so effing gut-wrenching.

The other day, George, my favorite curmudgeon, posted a comment in which he first alluded to and then installed all the lyrics of a Country Joe McDonald song. Make no mistake about it, my friends: if anyone can save what little remains of this republic and its storied freedoms, it will be the curmudgeons, the sinkers of heels into the sand, the angry, and the vocal.

And so, a toast to George and all the curmudgeons of America: keep on truckin’!

Memento Mori…and all that stuff

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So, as expected, the CardioDoc prescribed a blood pressure med. When I pointed out to him that if a drug has a bizarre side effect, I will get it (and no, it doesn’t matter whether I know what the side effects are or not), he came up with something so mild one can even eat grapefruit with it. Besides a little diarrhea, a little belly pain, a little syncope, and kidney failure, it’s fairly benign.

Lovely.

You have to die of something, and between you and me, dropping dead of a heart attack, which occurred to my great-grandmother and my great-aunt when they were in their mid-90s, looks a helluva lot better than dying of cancer while bat-brained doctors stand around hooting that you’re a mental case, as occurred to my mother in her early 60s. It also looks a great deal better than dying of kidney failure, which is a) a possible outcome of high blood pressure and b) a possible outcome of blood-pressure drugs. If one could be sure of the heart attack, possibly one would have a clearer view of the best course of action.

Whenever I’m in a doctor’s office or, God forfend, an ER, my blood pressure obligingly goes into the 150s. Here at home, a battery-operated blood pressure monitor registers in the high 110s and low 120s. But CardioDoc blew those figures off this afternoon — he said home BP monitors are unreliable and don’t measure a real figure: you have to take three readings five minutes apart (consuming FIFTEEN MINUTES of generally miserable time), and then average them to get anything resembling accuracy.

Well. Since every time I repeat a BP reading here at the Funny Farm, it’s invariably lower than the first effort, that would push my readings significantly lower. The guy refused to even look at the record I had. Sooo…. I’m thinking maybe I need to get a second opinion about this before I start gulping prescription drugs.

I don’t know. If the guy is right, I need to get on this stuff ASAP. If he’s wrong, it could do more harm than good; at best, it’s unnecessary.

Tomorrow I’m driving out of town. You’re not supposed to drive after taking the stuff until you see what it will do to you, since it can make you pass out. So the soonest I can start gulping this chemical down will be next Thursday…after I finish the dawn junket to Scottsdale.

Two things I like about this guy are that he seems to be right about the heart palpitations, which are extremely uncomfortable and scary, and that he is manifestly correct about the fact that I’m some 20 pounds overweight. How can one do without reassurances that you’re NOT old and you’re NOT fat?

Yes. Young Dr. Kildare has denied not only  that I’m old (give me a break, kid!) but that I’m fat. When I remarked in passing that I need to go on a diet, he looked at the 158-pound weight I’d logged that morning and allowed as to how I was within the “normal” range for my gender, age, and height. Right. And I look like I’m three months pregnant because…why?

CardioDoc suggested that I might be able to shuck the BP drug if I would get off my fanny and exercise (now there’s a radical idea) and if I would lose 22 pounds. These are things I’ve known for a long time but been too indolent to act on.

He also believes that the uncomfortable chest sensations are a manifestation of a genetic tendency to anxiety, which he describes as something different from stress, per se. It amounts to a pathological over-response to pretty much routine stressors. And I do have to say, I get these “heart palpitations” or whatever they are when a series of stressful events or situations occurs over a long period of time, especially when these happenings kick into “it never stops” mode. Even when on the surface things seem fairly quiet, what goes on day by day can add up, in the same way small savings here and there can add up to big savings, or small expenses here and there can add up to big bills.

Consider, for example, the day-by-day sources of stress I’ve recorded in the blood-pressure and Holter monitor logs since this annoying medical venture began:

4/10

• About 3:30 or 4:45, client called. Long angst-filled talk about her co-editor & the project.

• Racing out the door, late for choir, find notice in mail from IRS billing me for $10,000 in 2011 taxes and accusing me of fraud. Fly out the door to rehearsal. Sing for 2 hours.

• Accountant didn’t get message. Client from Hell persists. Student submits late paper in format I can’t open.

4/11

• Get up after awaking at 4 a.m.

• Return extremely difficult edited essay to anthology editors, with involved cover note. Start calculating billable hours. Not washed, made up or dressed! Now running late for 7:15 meeting.

• Late; fly out the door. Make u-turn, fly back to house, RUN to take out overfilled recycling bin, run back to car, race to Scottsdale thru rush-hour traffic.

• Finish chairing business group meeting; have light breakfast w/ coffee. Haggle with nuisance client. Discuss client’s work and general business issues with designer.

• Correspond with book packager, client. Correspond with accountant. Try to find password for p/w-protected financial statements from manager. E-mail binging nonstop. Client’s co-editor nagging for a bill.

• Trim tree suckers and cut back dead (man-eating!) agaves.

5/22

• Insomnia; meet with difficult client; undergo stress test; worry about health; drive thru awful traffic.

5/23

• Insomnia; take on new client’s challenging project on tight deadline; worry about health.

5/24

• Meet with client starting at 8:30 a.m.; it’s after 12:30 before he leaves. Edit Chinese scholars’ work on 5-day deadline.

5/25

• Just once I’d like to be able to sleep for 6 or 7 hours straight. SO tired!

5/26

• Wrestle with annoying ditzy job; pressure from author to accelerate deadline; many errors in Au’s References; Word as usual puts up a fight.

• Work  like a horse to finish Chinese researchers’ paper. Word crashes. MacBook crashes; looks like its drive is fried but it finally reboots. Terror!

• Carbonize my dinner on the grill; have to throw out expensive cut of lamb that I couldn’t afford in the first place & sure as hell can’t afford to toss in the garbage.

5/27

• Spend day shopping w/ KJG at Arrowhead, which should be fun. Feel terrible most of the time: weary, lightheaded, marginally headachey, tense sensation in chest.

• Return from dog walk to find front door open. No one there. Unsettling, after prior garage invasion episode

5/28

• Land another new client! Yet another Chinese scholar, likely to be difficult and low-paid. Chinese faculty’s salaries make ours look like manna from heaven.

• Getting an ear infection — hurts.

• Drive from pillar to post; hustle a business owner to donate to next fall’s choir fund-raiser.

• Get told I need blood pressure meds.

• Make my way through rush-hour traffic to pick up Rx at Costco; luckily, I decide to go by surface roads, because a crash closes the offramp that leads from the freeway to said Costco.

• Lose my American Express card. Find it while on interminable hold with AMEX customer disservice robot.

• Dog is sick. Throws up. Tomorrow I have to carry her in the car to Yarnell, spend the whole day there, carry her back down to SDXB’s house, then drive her home. Hope she doesn’t throw up in the car, on La Maya’s floor, or on SDXB’s floors. What on earth could be wrong with her? She’s been under the weather for days and not only is not getting better, she seems to be getting worse.

Gaaaahhhhhhhh! Is there any question why my heart pounds like a gazelle’s on the veldt?  This is not a hereditary disorder. This is fuckin’ normal! Whose heart would not pound when every goddamn day plays out like that?

So as I was saying, one of CardioDoc’s appealing traits is his advice that the way to deal with all this is to indulge in a spate of wildly vigorous, totally exhausting exercise. I’ve tried this several times and it works.

Today when I came home from picking up the prescription, I fell in the pool and swam a dozen laps as fast as I could go without stopping. It worked. I feel pretty good right now.

And it’s almost 10:30 and I’ve gotta go to bed. Hope to get more than four hours’ sleep tonight.

Prepare Your Business for Disaster

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tornado2When I wrote about preparing your family and your home for the various kinds of emergencies and catastrophes that can befall us, I surely had no idea the subject would suddenly become so topical. Again. We’ve seen, time and again, the danger and heartache that a natural disaster brings to individuals, families, and homeowners. But what about business owners and leaders? What can you do to prepare your business for disaster?

Some business entrepreneurs have been there before us and can offer some advice. Forbes contributor Elaine Pofeldt, for example, lists some wish-I’d-thought-of-this preparations that would have helped get her own and her husband’s home-based businesses through Hurricane Sandy:

• generator
• car charger for laptops
• back-up Internet service
• printed list of hotels in nearby states
• bicycle at the ready.

If your business has outgrown a room in the back of the house and is an established, brick-and-mortar retail store, wholesale operation, or service office, your planning issues are more complex and more crucial to the business’s survival. Some 25 percent of small businesses are unable to come back after a natural disaster, largely because they are unprepared. A December 2012 survey showed that 74 percent of businesses have no disaster plan, 84 percent have no natural disaster insurance, and a third have no idea how quickly they could get back in operation after a natural disaster.

Experts urge the importance of several coordinating strategies. These include

• having a disaster recovery plan in place;
• migrating IT functions, data, applications, and processes to the Cloud;
• developing a back-up communication system that does not rely on cell phones;
• and anticipating ways to help restore normalcy to employees whose lives are upended.

Clearly, a crucial strategy is to move data and computer functions off-site, to a secure site in the Cloud. This should include not only archived records and programs, but all work in progress. Not only will this protect your company’s and your clients’ data, it can make it possible for employees to work remotely, in case they can’t get to the office or the office itself is out of commission.

The Pacific County (Washington) Economic Development Council has posted an excellent and broad-ranging series of guides and checklists for business preparedness, in connection with a conference on the subject. If you own a business or are in charge of preparedness at your workplace, this is an invaluable series of resources. While you’re at this site, click on the “Business Planning Document” link at the top of the page. This will load a Word document containing a full business preparedness plan whose purpose is “to allow the company to resume mission critical operations within twenty-four to forty-eight hours, followed by the resumption of all other company operations within three to five days.”

Financial Services Group PNC adds the suggestion that business managers identify their organization’s most vulnerable points — computers located on a first floor vulnerable to flooding, for example — and take action to remedy those situations before the fact.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has published several pages of useful information at its website, including a set of planning and implementation guides for businesses. Also on these pages you can find suggestions for building emergency kits, either for families or for businesses, and descriptions of various kinds of hazards and how to prepare for them. Another FEMA document, “Every Business Should Have a Plan,” provides a succinct set of recommendations for preparations to help to keep your employees safe during an emergency and help your company stay in business afterward.

King David HotelThere are actually two aspects to disaster preparedness: readying oneself and one’s group for natural disasters and preparing for manmade disasters and catastrophic human error. Quite a lot of information addresses the possibility of natural events such as earthquakes, tornadoes, fire, and floods, but there’s less public information about preparing for a terrorist attack. Probably the best organized and most useful discussion appears at FEMA’s site on terrorist hazards. There you’ll find links to pages with details on protecting yourself from biological and chemical threats, cyberattacks, explosions, nuclear blasts, and radioactive dispersion devices.

Another of the best planning documents designed to help businesses cope with manmade disasters is a primer published by Business Executives for National Security. This guide covers the several possible kinds of terrorist attacks, risk assessment and preparation, employee training, terrorism insurance, ways a business can respond to a terrorist attack, and recovery. It includes a short, to-the-point checklist.

In the recovery department, the Small Business Administration offers a variety of business physical recovery loans for companies in a declared disaster zone.

Palm Beach County (Florida) provides a business guide for disaster preparedness that also addresses bomb threats, enraged employees or customers, sabotage, cyberterrorism, and hacking. And King County (Washington) publishes a short and to-the-point set of actions to take in various scenarios, ranging from hazard recognition to survival if you’re trapped under debris.

The Red Cross has a PDF on responding to terrorist attacks; it contains some helpful advice, including instructions for sheltering in place.

In 2003, the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) prepared an eye-opening report on potential terrorist actions and the nation’s preparedness for them. A key part of this discussion has to do with the threat to financial markets posed by a successful, major attack. We saw what happened when some joker hacked in to the Associated Press’s Twitter feed and posted a report that the White House had been struck — an instantaneous, deep stock market dip. Had the report been real, the consequences would have been very serious, indeed. The GAO report deals largely with the financial markets, the banking industry, and the telecommunications infrastructure. Even though it’s a decade old, the report and its recommendations are still worth a business executive’s attention.

Images:

Tornado in central Oklahoma, 1999. U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Public domain.
King David Hotel (Jerusalem) after attack by Irgun, 1946. Public domain.

Why I Don’t Need a Gun

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P1020137…Because everybody else and his little brother has a gun.

Yesterday I got up to the mountain park a bit  late — around 11 a.m., after meetings and a trip to My Sister’s Attic to consign a set of old Noritake china. The day was warm, and so barely a soul was to be seen on the trails across the flat valley between Shaw Butte and North Mountain.

That was good: I didn’t have to listen to people yakking their heads off at the top of their lungs — the air filled with birdsong and the wind’s whisper almost drowned out the grumble of traffic on the surrounding roads.

On the other hand, of course, if one fell and broke an ankle, one would be stuck out there in the heat until five or six o’clock before anyone else would come along. And, also of course, if there’s another person out there at mid-day, it’s just you and him.

About halfway between the Seventh Avenue & Peoria trailhead and the dam below Thunderbird Road, I passed a guy walking toward me. Nothing notable, except that there was no one else on the trails around noon on a 90-degree day.

After a bit, I realized that every time I turned around, here was this guy.

He wasn’t a big man — just a strange-looking little fellow with a glabrous, ageless face. Hard to tell his age, because his head and much of his face were covered by a big hat. He passed me twice coming in my direction, and then as I headed back toward the car I saw him walking ahead of me up the trail.

And I noticed that occasionally he glanced back in my direction.

Weird. Probably harmless. But weird.

Occasionally he would slow down enough that the distance between us kept narrowing.

I stopped in the shade of a paloverde and stepped into the shrubbery so that I couldn’t be seen, figuring to wait until this character moved on.

At one point he stopped and looked back. At another, he could have borne left or right at a Y in the trail. Naturally, he was going my way.

At the Y, I picked up a narrow, flat rock and put it into my pocket, which already bulged a little where it held my car keys. Oh…did I mention I had on a pair of short-shorts?  Yeah. Stupid.

About three inches of the rock stuck out of the pocket. I wrapped my hand around it so with the fingers laying against the outside of my cut-offs in sort of…oh, the position they might be in if they were resting on a trigger guard. The stone was not visible — only my hand obviously holding something that was hidden in my pocket.

😀

He did slow down enough that I caught up and passed him. I figured if he tried anything I’d brain him with the rock — only by serendipity had I picked up a piece of granite that fit in my pocket like a nice little lady’s Derringer.

We said “hello” again. I went on my way. Nothing happened.

Weird. Harmless, but weird.

Medigap Runaround, 2013

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So I get a notice from Mutual of Omaha that they’re jacking up the premium for my Medicare supplement insurance (known as “Medigap” because it fills the considerable gaps in Medicare Parts A and B coverage) by $433.58, an amount that happens to be exactly $433.58 more than I can afford.

In the mind-numbingly complicated maze that is the private Medicare supplemental insurance landscape, I have Plan F, a mid-priced scheme that effectively covers everything that Parts A and B do not cover. The last time I talked with Mutual of Omaha, their CSR suggested I switch to Plan G, which covers everything except a $147.50 Part B deductible. Part G premiums are so much lower than Plan F’s now that even paying the deductible out of pocket you still come out ahead.

Ooohkayyyy….

Meanwhile, I’ve compiled a list of a dozen companies that do business in Arizona and are charging less than Mutual of Omaha for Plan F.

Monday, I begin the endless round of calling with Mutual of Omaha itself, trying to get underwritten for Part G.

I speak with one Ernest. He says Plan G will cost $116.28, well under what I’ve been paying for Plan F. I ask about the underwriting. He transfers me to another agent, one Nicole. She says she’s a licensed agent in Arizona. But she also won’t talk with me. She tells me to call an 800 number and utter these words: “I have a Plan F and want to change to Plan G, and I want underwriting.”

I dial the 800 number and, interestingly, reach another Nicole. I say, “I have a Plan F and want to change to Plan G, and I want underwriting.” She is confused. Do I want the Underwriting Department? I say I was told to call her number, and I start to complain about the runaround.

She transfers me to one Carol. I explain what I want. Carol is in life insurance. She transfers me — to a phone tree.

Eventually, I reach one Cheryl. She says you have to fill out a whole new application for a whole new policy. She says they’ll send it to me.

Now I call Universal Fidelity. Kayla answers and says she can give me a quote. She says their Plan F is $133.85 — about what I’m paying now — and Plan G is $112.99. She explains that you have to trigger the Medicare deductible before Plan G will cover anything. This implies that there could be circumstances that Plan G will not cover, since not all issues covered by Medicare A & B are doctors’ visits. She says an agent will call me — some guy from American Health Underwriters in Ft. Worth.

I call Everence, where I reach one Jason. He says Everence is a fraternal benefit organization for fundamentalist Christians. Episcopalians do not count as Christians in their book.

Next I call American Family (the ever-annoyingly advertised AFLAC). Here I get an incredible electronic runaround and finally give up without ever reaching a human.

Moving on, at United Healthcare I reach one Don, who tells me that their Plan F costs $180 a month and their plan G, $160. He tries to corral me into an AARP HMO. I tell him to get lost.

Now I dial Heartland, where a person named Tracy transfers me to a male person with a name pronounced “Teal.” He’s with Equitable Life. He says their Plan F costs $149 and Plan G costs $140. There’s a $20 application fee, he notes. He says he will send an application and gives me a direct phone number at which to reach him.

Next I call Forethought. It’s after hours now on the East Coast, and their offices are closed.

I wonder if Government Personnel Mutual will cover state employees or the children of Merchant Marine officers. In the course of searching for an answer to this question on their website, I’m shunted to a webpage of something called Medicare Marketplace. I dial the 866 number and reach one Larry Peters, who presents himself an insurance agent & broker in Omaha. He says that Government Personnel actually started out serving only federal employees and members of the military, but it now covers civilians, too. Its plan G is only $110.70; if I want a Plan F, the next-best deal he can get for me is with American Continental at $141.94.

However, he says, it’s late at his office and the computer system is about to shut down. Could we talk the following day? We exchange phone numbers and agree to try to get in touch about mid-morning Arizona time.

On Tuesday I leave the house at 6:30 for a hike up the mountain and get back around 8:30. An hour or so later, I call him back. He says the application fee is $25. I agree to this and say I’m interested in Plan G. He asks the  underwriting questions and says he will send the form.

In the meantime, I’ve done a little research.

By Tuesday morning, I know that Universal Fidelity got a negative rating from A.M. Best in 2011 and again in March of 2012. Heartland has racked up a grade of F (for “flunk”) from the Better Business Bureau as well as 8 complaints at Ripoff Report. A. M. Best downgraded it in 2009.

Central States, which I  have not yet tried to reach but whose rates look pretty high, has an A. M. Best rating of A+; Manhattan, with slightly higher rates, has a rating of B+ and a long-term rating of bbb-; A. M. Best considers it to be “stable.” Government Personnel Mutual is rated A- (also in the “excellent” range) with a long-term rating of a- and a “stable” outlook; the Texas Department of Insurance’s excellent website shows no complaints against it.

Later on Tuesday, one Mike from Universal Fidelity calls. He says that company charges $129.85 for Plan F and $108  for Plan G. He’s a fast talker and he’s trying to maneuver me into committing to one or the other of these. In the course of conversation, he says the application fee is $45.

Since that’s clearly beyond the pale — the others are charging $20 to $25 for the privilege of asking humbly whether you may be allowed to purchase a policy to fill in the empty spaces around the capacious Medicare coverage — I ask him if that $45 is billed to me when he puts the application in the mail or only after I fill it in and submit it. He won’t give me a straight answer. I say, “You’re not answering my question. Am I billed $45 simply because you mail me a blank application, or am I billed $45 when you receive the completed application?” Disingenuously, he says I’m billed $45 when they send me a statement for the Part G coverage.

Annoyed, I say, “Look, you have competition. Why don’t you wait a couple of days before sending this application to me, until I can see what I can find out about Plan G from the several other companies that offer it in Arizona at affordable rates.” He flounders. I say, unequivocally, “Wait two days before you send this application. I will be in touch with you.”

This morning while I’m at a meeting, Mike calls back. He wants me to return his call. I’m involved with grading papers and writing a report about the meeting and so decide to delay that particular annoyance. While I’m still working, he calls again and leaves a message on my voicemail saying he had the prices for Arizona wrong, and that Plan F is actually $133.85 and Plan G, $112.79. They’ll divide the $45 application gouge between two months, making the first two months’ Plan G payments a bargain $135.29. Mighty white of ’em, eh?

Amazing picture, isn’t it? Over two days, I’ve called SIX insurance companies offering identical Medigap plans at six different rates and I’ve spoken to TWELVE different people and an impenetrable telephone tree. Of the twelve humans, nine could give me no information of any value, two tried to hustle me, and one may be hustling me but seems to represent a reasonably reputable company offering a plan at an almost affordable rate. Alleged plan G rates range from $112.99 to $160, for the same, identical, federally regulated coverage; “application fees” range from $20 to $45.

To start the underwriting process, I’ve had to give my Social Security number to a guy I met through an Internet page and who for all know could be Osama Bin Laden’s nephew, out to fund his organization’s enterprise with identity theft. And yes, I’ve asked around among friends and business acquaintances and been unable to find anyone living in Arizona who works as a broker for Medicare supplemental plans. The best I can say is that there is indeed a Larry Peters running an insurance agency in Omaha.

Ain’t private enterprise grand?

Why not  just have Medicare provide full coverage, instead of throwing elderly, frail, and often fuzzy-minded citizens into such a gawdawful briar patch?

What a flicking nightmare.

Apparently I’m going to have to go through this rat-race about once every year or two.

I did find an outfit that issues reports on Medicare Supplement and Part D (prescription drug) plans. The report on Part D will set you back $49. Their report on Medigap insurers is $99. So…that’s $150, just to try to get an allegedly unbiased comparison of these outfits.

Otherwise, there appears to be no help available to consumers for navigating this dangerous and expensive mess.