Coffee heat rising

Stuff! Where to find storage space for it

by

Frugal Scholar, still one of my favorite bloggers after all these many months, reflects on decluttering and the challenge of living in a historic house with little storage space. LOL! I do recall that the beautiful cottages in Phoenix’s Encanto district could be heavy on charm and light on closet and cabinet space.

FS describes some of the things we can’t bring ourselves to get rid of for sentimental reasons. That led me to google Steiff animals—I have a whole trunkful of them, my mother’s Christmas presents bestowed each year throughout my childhood—which led to this amazing site. Is this or is it not a hoot? And OMG, I have one of these! Who would think anyone would pay that for an old stuffed animal?

So, given the fact that we are not about to give up our 50-year-old stuffed toys or the faded midcentury tablecloth we acquired as a young bride, what to do about storage space?

In this house, I’ve managed to contend by

• adding or widening shelving;
• rededicating clothing closets to other kinds of storage;
• building new closet and cabinet space; and
• using furniture creatively for storage.

One of Satan and Proserpine‘s DIY renovation projects was to pull out all the early 1970s kitchen cabinets and replace them with handsome new Kitchenmaid cabinets. This made the kitchen look very attractive. However, it had a few drawbacks.

Those old Mediterranean-brown cabinets were very spacious, even without adustable shelving. Moving in, I discovered that my dishes, which are Heathware and sized the way dinner plates were sized in the 1970s, wouldn’t fit in the wall cabinets! They ended up in one of the deep under-counter drawers Satan had installed for the pots and pans, leaving that much less storage for cookware.

And the house originally had a generous set of cabinets hung from the ceiling over the counter that held the sink. This was where I had kept two sets of dishes and all my glassware in the old house, built by the same contractor. Satan and Proserpine had removed these by way of opening up the space between the family room and the kitchen. This did indeed look very nice…but it meant the kitchen had just enough storage space for dishes and cookware used every day, assuming you were the type who thinks “cooking” means “warming in a microwave.”

Well, I do cook. And I have a number of items that I don’t use every day but when I need them, I need them. Easily, without having to climb into the attic to get at them.

When I first moved in, I set up some bricks and boards in the garage to hold things that wouldn’t fit in the kitchen, along with various yard care and cleaning items. This worked OK, but the problem with open shelving, especially outdoors, is dirt. The garage door doesn’t fit tightly, and so dust would seep in through the cracks all the time. Whenever Gerardo and his Home Depot Parking Lot Caballeros would show up with their blowers, they’d blow dirt and leaves in through the cracks; same would happen all summer long while the monsoons held forth. Any kitchen items had to be washed thoroughly before use.

Eventually I installed inexpensive garage cabinets. For about a thousand bucks (as I recall—may have been more like $800), I lined both sides of the two-car garage with melamine-coated particleboard cabinetry. Because only one car is parked in there, one of the cabinets could be extra-deep. It leaves plenty of room for two smallish cars. On occasion, SDXB has parked his Toyota truck in there next to my van—that’s a tight fit, but it can be done.

These cabinets hold a ton of stuff. They allow me to stash lifetime supplies of Costco’s finest paper goods and cleaning supplies and still cling to my precious collection of old someday-(surely!)-it-could-come-in-handy glass bottles.

I moved the bricks and boards indoors and set them up inside the closet in the bedroom that is my office. This provided ample space for work supplies, useless old scraps of computer hardware, books that won’t fit in the small bookcase in here, and a great deal of worthless junk. Removing the closet rod created extra room between shelves. There actually is room in there to install another board shelf above the one that came with the house, but I’ve never gotten around to that project.

Notice that bricks & boards lend themselves to constructing extra-wide shelving. The two bottom shelves are two boards wide, effectively doubling their available storage space.

The guest room had no closet. For reasons unknown, some previous owner had removed the closet from this bedroom. Low on linen closet space, I hired a handyman to build a new closet and install closet doors like those in the other secondary bedrooms. He did this for surprisingly little cost—I don’t recall how much, but it was nothing like what I expected. If you know how to frame out a wall and can tape and plaster wallboard, you could do the job yourself. Just because a room has one closet doesn’t mean it can’t have two closets. You could easily add a second closet to a spare room that’s rarely used.

The new closet, too, was furnished with bricks and boards. The handyman offered to install a set of built-in shelves, but since future buyers would be looking for clothes closets in the bedrooms, I decided to keep the shelving mobile.

All but the top shelf in this construction are two boards wide.

Widening shelves that don’t span the depth of a closet can add a surprising amount of storage space. In this hall closet, for example, the original shelf was only half as deep as the closet itself. Simply setting another board atop supports nailed to the drywall more than doubled the size of the shelf.

That flange toward the back is a metal coathanger thing nailed along the front edge of the old shelf, installed when the house was built. So, all the space in front of it is new shelf space. The extra board not only gave me room to store lightbulbs, vacuum cleaner supplies, and miscellaneous junk, it even provided a space for one of those battery-powered closet lights.

In the master bedroom closet, Satan had already added an extra shelf by spanning the width of the back end of the walk-in closet between existing shelves that ran along the left and right walls. It’s not much extra space, but every little bit helps.

The left side of that closet was designed with two shelves accommodating those strange coathanger things (which substituted for traditional clothes rods—SDXB replaced one of them with a regular rod), providing twice as much closet space for short items. Very nice, but the lower shelf was quite narrow. Here, too, I simply added another board. Years ago I got in the habit of storing shoes out of dog’s reach, since the German shepherd was given to eating shoes and the greyhound liked to furnish his nest with them.

Beneath the shelf, there’s a small bookcase, which also holds shoes and boots.

You realize, of course, that armoires were originally intended to store linens and clothing, not televisions. I was reminded of this when visiting my sister-in-sin’s beautiful old Seattle house, where she had placed an armoire on the second-floor landing and filled it with bedding and towels. So, when I bought a new lightweight feather “blanket” for summer and couldn’t figure out where to stash the winter comforter, I thought…why not?

This would annoy me if I watched TV very much. But I don’t. Eventually, I’ll probably hang the television set on a wall and fill the armoire with linens and things. It came with an extra shelf, which is stored inside the piece. With three deep shelves and a large drawer, it offers a lot of extra storage space.

So it goes: cobbled together—some of it jerry-rigged—but it works.

Walking Away from a Mortgage: Is it immoral?

by

Late last year, University of Arizona law professor Brent White stirred up some controversy by observing that underwater homeowners should feel no guilt about walking away from properties whose value has fallen way below the amount owed on them. Pointing out that the very lenders who cooked up questionable residential mortgages feel no compunction about walking away from underwater commercial properties, White pointed out that buying a residential property is no less a business transaction than buying a commercial one, and that mixing emotion and “morality” into the transaction has saddled homeowners with a disproportionate burden for the current real estate fiasco.

Cutting one’s losses when a property is no longer worth what you’re paying for it is called “strategic default.” Despite the clear fact that a real estate transaction is a real estate transaction, many people can’t get past the idea that individuals, as opposed to corporations, have some moral obligation to stick with a bad business deal. Others argue that what’s good for the corporate goose is good for the individual gander. Just check out some of the comments here and here and here.

The story’s not quite as simple as it seems on the surface. Depending on what state you live in, you may or may not be able to hand a property back to the bank without consequence. In some states, lenders can come after an owner who walks or does a short sale for the difference between the house’s selling price and the amount of the loan. Your credit rating, of course, will be trashed for several years to come. And if Soggy Bottom is not your primary residence, you’ll owe taxes on the amount you defaulted on.

IMHO, White has got something. If you’re stuck with a bad loan for your primary residence and you live in a state where a lender can’t sue you for a deficiency judgment (such as Arizona), it may be financially irresponsible NOT to walk. And there’s no reason to feel guilty or morally incompetent when the mess results from no fault of your own.

M’hijito and I copurchased a small house in mid-town Phoenix’s established, mostly middle-class north central corridor at a time when we believed the real estate collapse was nearing bottom. Our agent, a very smart older man with an MBA and many years of experience in business and real estate, thought the same thing. We estimated the house’s value would drop about $4,000 to $6,000, level out for a year or two, and then begin to rise at about 3% to 6% p.a., the historic rate of increase in that area before the bubble.

Neighbors were furious with our seller for unloading the house at what they thought was a rapaciously low price.

How wrong could we all have been?

The house is now worth (if you believe Zillow) $75,000 less than we paid for it and $51,000 less than we owe.

We planned to hold the house for five to ten years, with M’hijito living in it most of the time or renting it should he take a job in another city or marry and need a larger home. After no more than a decade, at which time I planned to retire, we expected to collect a small profit or at least break even, split whatever equity we recovered, and go on our respective ways.

Now M’hijito feels stuck in the house. Because we can’t even begin to sell the house for what we owe on it, he can’t move to another city in search of a better job (workers are famously underpaid in Arizona) or go out of state to pursue an MBA at a decent school. Having lost my job and seen my retirement savings plummet $180,000 when the Bush economy crashed, I’m in a different financial position (indeed) than I was when we bought the place.

Fortunately, we did have enough sense to get a loan through our credit union. Unlike the banks of recent infamy, the credit union has been willing to negotiate. But they resist even contemplating a cut in principal, which is what needs to happen.

In response to my layoff from ASU, the credit union arranged to prorate our payments over 40 years (instead of 30) and to cut our interest rate to 4 percent. This dropped the mortgage payments into a more affordable range—and to something close to what we could theoretically get in rent.

The deal is good for only a year, however. After that, the credit union will consider renewing it for another year or will give us the option to refinance.

Although of course I’m pleased to see our payments reduced to something almost within reason, I’m still unhappy with the underlying predicament: the house’s value has dropped so drastically that we may never recover our investment in it, and so money paid toward the loan amounts to money down the drain. In an optimistic scenario, it will be another ten years before the house’s value rises to what we owe on the mortgage—to say nothing of the healthy down payment we put down at the outset. And please: don’t even ask what it costs to renovate a 1950 cottage!

For the time being, M’hijito likes the house and is comfortable there. He rents one of the rooms to bring in cash to cover maintenance and repairs. And with the mortgage adjustment, the roof over his head is costing him no more than he would pay for a rental. But the point is, we’re both losing money on the property.

We did everything we could to make a responsible decision: purchasing a house that was certainly no McMansion, selecting a centrally located neighborhood ripe for gentrification and close to the much-ballyhooed lightrail line, buying within our means, avoiding shady mortgage instruments, and selecting a lender that was unlikely to rip us off. And we’re still behind the 8-ball.

A corporation’s board of directors would be remiss not to default under those circumstances. So…should a homeowner be held to a different standard? If so, why?

Image: Tennessee house, ca. 1933-36. Tennessee Valley Authority. Public Domain.

Apple: I think i’m in love…

by

No question about it: Apple’s service rocks!

When I bought the cute li’l MacBook last December, the staff said I could bring the iMac and the MacBook in and they would synch the two, and while they were at it would upgrade the iMac to Snow Leopard.

So yesterday I trotted all my computer hardware over there. They sent a guy out to my car to haul the stuff into the store. They were nice to me. They spoke kindly to me. They did not talk over my head. I could even understand what the techies were saying, more or less.

On inspection, the tech dude decided he couldn’t install Snow Leopard in the iMac because it doesn’t have the required memory. The computer’s “too old” to upgrade quoth he.

Too old? Three years is “too old?”

“If that thing were were a little kid, it would just be toddling around the living room!” said I, “If it were a dog, it would still be a puppy!”

“Well,” he said. “I didn’t mean it’s old. It’s just…oldER.”

😀

What do you suppose Apple and all the PC manufacturers think we should do with all the hardware they engineer into superannuation after three years? Possibly we should have special landfills designed to hold only defunct computers. Might be risky, though: all that weight concentrated in a few places could knock the earth off its orbit.

He did clue me on how to install some new RAM, which he says is very easy to do. I’ll probably do that in the next few weeks and then upgrade to the sleek and powerful Snow Leopard.

After promising a 24-hour turnaround, they called me at about 3:30 to let me know they were done! Imagine that: they did the service in about three hours.

Trot back over to the Apple store. They send another cute guy to haul all the junk back out to my car.

Except for the MobileMe fiasco, when the store’s staff was overwhelmed, Apple’s service has consistently been excellent. It’s best to stay away from the place when the company is introducing some new, exuberantly hyped product (the iPad is supposed to come out on April 3—I ain’t goin’ near the place for at least two weeks after that). But during normal times, the people at Apple are pleasant to deal with and effective in their advice and service. That alone is probably worth the machine’s extra cost.

Financial Freedom: Building the bankroll, part 2

by

We’ve seen that a key part to underwriting Bumhood is living below your means and using the resulting extra cash from income to build savings.

The corollary to this important principle is that your money needs to work for you. That means it has to earn money instead of you having to go to work to earn a paycheck.

How to make this happen? Invest. Your strategy should not be excessively conservative, because truly safe, FDIC-insured instruments such as high-interest savings accounts and CDs don’t return enough to keep up with inflation. Although clearly some cash should reside in your bank or credit union, where it will be insulated from a major market crash such as the one we recently saw, to grow your money you have to take some risk. This means investing something in the stock market or (yes!) in real estate.

Investment plans that work to support bumhood are long-haul arrangements.* Savings should be invested for the long term in reasonably stable instruments such as fairly staid mutual funds and left there, even when the market slides. Low-overhead mutual funds are an excellent choice, because the various costs involved in maintaining them do not bite significantly into your gains. Vanguard and Fidelity funds lead the pack here.

Some mutual funds buy stocks; others buy bonds; still others are balanced funds with a variety of investments. Read the prospectus for each fund that interests you, and be sure your choices don’t duplicate each other. Most advisers suggest that equities investments be allocated about 60 percent to stocks and about 40 percent to bonds, because as a general rule when stock values fall bond values rise. (This is a huge oversimplification, as I’m sure we’ll hear from readers. Study up on investment products. Several “For Dummies” books on the subject have good to excellent reviews, and regular reading of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times business section can be instructive.)

Stocks and bonds are not the only places to grow savings. Some people have done well investing in rental real estate. This also is a long-term hold: expect to keep the property for 10 to 20 years before it turns a profit. As we’ve seen, for investors real estate presents no less risk than the stock market, and so you  need to be prepared to watch values go up and down. A quick perusal of Amazon’s offerings on real estate investment will clue you to the amount of snake oil out there: be extremely careful, and do not operate without a trusted adviser who can prove his (or her) expertise. As with the stock market, it’s important to do your homework and know what you’re doing before investing. If real estate interests you but the prospect of dealing with renters does not, consider a real estate investment trust (REIT) or an REIT mutual fund. Sometimes limited partnerships invest in commercial real estate, although this tool is probably not for everyone.

Because money sitting in the bank does nothing for you—it just sits there—it’s crucial to put your savings to work by investing in a diversified set of financial instruments, ranging from the relatively safe (CDs, the money market) to relatively risky. The degree of risk depends on your age (i.e., how many years you have left to make up any losses) and your personality. To make money work for you, you’ll need to take some risk with some part of your savings. But as you draw closer to your projected escape from the day job, it makes sense to pull back from riskier investments and shift funds to more conservative tools.

One way or another, at any age your savings should be working for you, and some part of it should be in stocks or instruments that earn similar returns. Over the years, my savings have returned about 8 to 9 percent, on average. Of course, that faltered when the Bush economy crashed. While the artificially pumped-up economy was hot, some months I would earn $8,000 on a $250,000 investment. Although all that went away when the market collapsed, returns are now back up in the 8 percent range.

Thus if I draw down the widely recommended 4 percent—more than I need to live on, as a matter of fact—savings will continue to grow even without my adding any  new cash.

And voilà! Full-blown financial freedom: Return on passive investments that meets or exceeds the amount you need to support yourself. The less you spend on your lifestyle, the more you can save, the more you can invest, and the sooner you can get off the day-job treadmill. Living below your means, faithful, regular saving, and wise investments can spring you free sooner than you think.

The Financial Freedom Series

• An Overview
• Education
• Work
• Debt
• The Health Insurance Hurdle
• Own Your Roof
• Bankrolling Bumhood, Part 1

____________________________________

* I am not an investment adviser! I am just a writer sitting in front of a computer. No part of this information should be taken as investment advice. For advice on financial planning, consult a tax professional and a certified financial planner. Always read all prospectuses and related information before investing in any stock, bond, or mutual fund.

Good grief! Near-disaster with Medicare Part D choice

by

So in the wee hours of the morning, while enjoying another spate of insomnia, I decided to kill some time looking up Wellcare, the Medicare Part D provider toward which I was leaning by the end of yesterday’s exploration of that corner of the insurance industry’s corporate bureaucracy.

I thought that  exploration was through the Looking Glass? Ah, no, my friends: that was down the Rabbit Hole!

Turns out that in 2009 the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services enjoined Wellcare from enrolling new customers in its Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D programs because of the egregiousness of the complaints against it. Says a Florida newspaper:

Regulators cited a long list of problems: deceptive sales practices, delays with urgent customer problems, forged enrollment documents and the highest complaint rate in the nation.

The “problems” have been going on for a while. In 2007, the FBI, HSS, and the Florida Attorney General’s office raided Wellpoint’s Tampa headquarters.

In a now-unsealed plea agreement [says Wikipdia], prosecutors and a former employee said the company inflated expenditures by submitting fake documents to the state. Under some mental health care contracts, WellCare was paid a flat per-patient fee and required to spend at least 80 percent of it on care. Any leftover amount beyond 20 percent was to be repaid to the state, but the bogus expenditures allowed WellCare to keep that surplus. WellCare agreed in August to repay $35 million, its best estimate of the total wrongly kept from 2002-2006. After the raid, the company restated its quarterly and annual profits, driving down net income by $32 million, and saw its top three executives resign. No criminal charges have been announced against WellCare or its officials but investigations by Florida, Connecticut and federal prosecutors are ongoing. The Securities and Exchange Commission is leading an informal investigation, and Wellcare faces numerous shareholder lawsuits and sealed whistleblower complaints, the company’s SEC filings say.

This is one of the best that Arizona offers?

Well, hell. I’m glad I looked the company up before I got myself into its Part D plan. But damn! this leaves me right back where I started before I spent several hours of my time trying to figure out which of these hideous outfits won’t rip me off or try to keep me from buying needed drugs.

There doesn’t seem to be anyplace you can go to get a straight story about these companies. The material at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services website is highly technical—there’s nothing that seems helpful for consumers. The HealthMetrix Research site addresses Medicare Advantage programs, which don’t interest me. The National Senior Citizens Law Center (NSCLC) noted in October 2009 that Wellcare still appeared in the government’s listing of Part D providers even though it was still prohibited from enrolling new customers. Very few, if any, intelligible resources are out there.

The Center for Medicare Advocacy notes,

Medicare beneficiaries, their advocates and other helpers cannot be assured that the information provided to them on the Plan Finder is accurate. They need to drill as deeply as possible into the Plan Finder tool to ascertain whether reference-based pricing and other utilization management tools apply to their prescriptions. They need to check the plan web site and contact the plan customer service line to ascertain how the pricing might work. Even then, they cannot be assured that the plan they believe to be the lowest cost drug plan for them will, in fact, provide the most coverage at the lowest cost.

NSCLC advises people to talk to their State Health Insurance Assistance  Program (SHIP). In Arizona this office is staffed by volunteers. I’ve had a couple of good experiences with those folks and one that was not so great. The last guy I got on the phone was an utter moron. He flat refused to listen to the question I was asking him and instead nattered on and interminably on with stuff that wasn’t relevant and that I already knew. Another one, a woman, was very nice and personally supportive, but when you came right down to it she just wanted to chat—what she told me wasn’t especially useful or enlightening. A third person gave me some very good information. But you see the issue: I had to call three times and talk to three different people to get a cogent answer to a simple question.

I can see I’m going to have to blow another day trying to figure this garbage out. Beyond annoying…beyond frustrating…it’s infuriating!

Medicare Part D: Another adventure in Wonderland

by

Just shoveled a couple more piles of bureaucratic grief off my desk, finally. I’ve put off dealing with Medicare Part D and Medigap insurance, mostly because after the interminable hassles entailed in getting free of state service, I’ve developed quite the flinch reflex about filling out forms. The mere thought of having to fill out another form makes my gut clench. And the prospect of having to navigate still more bureaucratic shoals gives me a headache. Put them together: you get a case of insomnia that would keep Dracula awake at noon.

With the “have to go to class now” excuse mooted by spring break, this morning I forced myself to return to the Medigap application from Mutual of Omaha, an outfit that, from what I can tell, is among the least rapacious of the insurers selling these products in Arizona.

As you might guess, I’m less than fond of medical insurance companies. Several hellish experiences in the past have led me to regard the health insurance industry as the Evil Empire of Bureaucracies. Contemplating a DIY transaction with any of the dark angels that inhabit that place gives me the willies. When Mutual of Omaha’s application arrived in the mail, I glanced over it and then set it aside on my desk, where it’s been gathering dust and sinking beneath the steady sprinkle of still other pieces of paper I don’t want to handle.

But it wasn’t as horrible as I feared. Though the form was six crowded pages long, two pages didn’t apply to me, and so trudging through it consumed only a half-hour or 45 minutes. The worst part was having to sign a form giving the insurance company access to all my private medical records, no holds barred. Sign, wretch, or it’s no Medigap coverage for you! I just hate that. Once I had an insurance company demand that my doctor hand over twenty-five years’ worth of notes on every consultation and treatment I had ever had with him or any of his partners. As you can imagine, I found that deeply offensive. I still find it deeply offensive. Yea, verily, I find the entire lash-up that is the U.S. healthcare system deeply offensive.

Anyway, off it went. That will set me back $91 a month.

Next, it was on to the Medicare Part D (Prescription Drug Coverage) conundrum. After you’ve figured out which of the rapacious insurance companies will provide you with a Medigap policy (which covers the very large holes in Medicare Parts A and B) at the least extortionate price, you are required to sign up for Part D, another pushmi-pullyu program that tries to make up for traditional Medicare’s lacunae.

Healthy as a horse? Don’t think you need it? Well, screw you! If you don’t sign up the instant you become eligible for Medicare but instead wait until you think the chances of illness are higher, then you’re charged a stiff fine. So it’s get on the boat now or pay through the schnozzola for the privilege of swimming out to the boat later on.

As with Medigap, a mob of insurers offers up Part D policies. Coverage is pretty much uniform, but monthly premiums range from around $10 a month to over $80 a month. Because Medigap and Part D are regulated by the federal government, the plans offer the same general features. As far as I can tell, the major differences are the deductibles, the rules governing which meds you may and may not have, customer (dis)service, and the ways individual companies find to maximize the cost of meds for the customer.

Mercifully, the feds have a site that will conjure up a table comparing aspects of all the Part D providers in your state. When I said I was 65 and about to start Medicare in Arizona, this site disgorged details on 44 outfits selling insurance here. Ugh!

To compare these details, you have to call up a separate page for each company, wherein you find all sorts of microscopically printed information. It does allow you to compare apples with apples, but the chore is not easy. To simplify matters, I picked a half-dozen that looked like they had relatively decent customer satisfaction (reviews are rated, Amazon.com-style, with one to five stars; for Arizona, none achieved a five-star ranking overall and only a couple made it to four). The “details” pages break the ratings down into four categories: customer service, complaints, a vague “member experience,” and drug price and safety. Several other issues are also presented in more detail.

On the surface, dizzying. To arrive at something like a meaningful guess at a reasonable choice, I set up an Excel spreadsheet. In it, I created columns for the monthly premium, the government’s estimated total monthly cost for a typical well customer and for someone who suffers a serious illness, the deductible, and the four ratings categories.

Strangely, the premium bears only vaguely on the probable cost of medication for a serious illness, such as a heart attack or congestive heart failure. With most policies, the overall monthly cost of such an ailment ranges from $150 to $200. That’s not always true, though: if you’ve subscribed to Aetna’s $82.20/month policy, a major illness is likely to cost you $200 to $250 a month.

Once I’d entered the data, I sorted it by several criteria. Click on the tables to see them in a readable font size.

The results, I think, helped to clarify matters. On the lower end, where monthly premiums are vaguely within reason, the annual deductible is, with one exception, an astonishing $310. This means, of course, that if you’re healthy and, like me, take no medications, or even if you take only one or two in generic form, you’re paying for air: most of the time your costs will come in way under the deductible. Paying more to get out of the deductible pushes your monthly overall cost so high (as, for example, in the pricey Aetna plan mentioned above) that you’d lose unless you had a very expensive chronic condition like Parkinson’s or MS.

Interestingly, the plan sold by AARP, which vaunts itself as the champion of the elderly, ranks rather low by most criteria.

An outfit called Wellcare consistently comes up with good to high ratings. It does especially well in the important categories of performance ratings and of drug safety and cost. This company offers two plans in Arizona, the “Classic” and the “Signature.” From what I can tell, the only difference is that the “Signature” plan has no deductible. When you compare the two plans’ overall monthly cost, you discover that even though the no-deductible plan will run you $15 a month more than the plan with the $310 deductible, the plans’ overall monthly cost is almost identical. So basically, you can expect the same results from the $20/month plan as you can from the $35/month plan!

So, though I have yet to go out on the Web to read consumer complaints, I’m leaning toward the Wellcare Classic. The cost is on the low end, but apparently service and coverage are about the same as the higher-end Signature policy. Customers are better satisfied with Wellcare than with most other vendors: the performance rankings put it second behind the pricey Medco, but only by a quarter of a point. Wellcare is the only one of our selected companies to achieve 5 points in any category—and it does so in the important matter of drug safety. (You understand, these outfits are capable of dictating what drugs you can take, and they do so on the basis of cost, ignoring potential side effects and interplay with certain chronic ailments like diabetes.)

Once all these plans (not to say “schemes”) are cobbled together to provide adequate healthcare coverage, the cost is astonishing.

Medicare Part B will cost me $110 a month. People who are already enrolled get no increase from the 2009 premium of $95; those who come on board in 2010, however, get an inflation gouge even though, like other beneficiaries, they get no commensurate increase in Social Security. Medigap: $90.80 a month. Medicare Part D: $19.70 a month. Total: just over $220 a month for starters.

I do understand that many people are paying a much larger gouge to cover one person. But still… Compared to the $36 a month I’ve been paying for the same coverage with no deductible and with only modest copays, it looks pretty stiff.

And to figure this stuff out, you end up taking a swan-dive through the Looking-Glass. I fail to understand why it’s necessary to make this business so complex, so difficult, and so scattered that you have to build a freaking spreadsheet to parse out your best choices!

Despite regulation that is supposed to guarantee uniform coverage, it has taken hours of analysis and puzzlement to identify Medigap and Part D policies that look like they won’t cheat me and appear to provide tolerable customer service. The whole process has been confusing and difficult…and I think I still have most of my marbles.

Imagine the confusion this mess creates for less educated or more vulnerable elders—and the opportunities to prey on them! It’s just effing inexcusable.

Update

“Inexcusable” about describes it. The plot thickens: as it develops the government’s opaque site dispenses information most kindly described as incomplete. Check out the next revelation.