Coffee heat rising

Did money just happen?

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Whoa! I think I just stumbled onto something amazing. Remember how SDXB told us “money happens”? Well…the stuff appears to be materializing as we scribble.

Well, not so much!
See the update here.

Yesterday I was talking with the people at the state Department of Administration about COBRA, which is administered through their agency.

The Great Desert University did another of its little numbers on me. Despite handing me a contract that says my last day of work was December 31, they “termed” me (the bureaucrat’s salubrious term for “terminated”) in their system on January 10. Because the eligibility for the COBRA discount ended on December 31, this would have rendered me unable to pay for health insurance, except that (thank God!) the Obama Administration extended the stimulus discount for those who are canned into February.

In the course of conversation, the ADOA rep remarked that during the first six months of COBRA, you’re covered whether or not you’re paying every month. For me, the payment under the ARRAS discount would amount to about $200.

I said, “So, if I haven’t paid for the first couple of months and then I’m in a car wreck and break every bone in my body and they cart me off to St. Joe’s emergency room, I can pony up the back payments and be covered?”

“That’s right.”

Hm. Come to think of it, I’ve heard that before.

Now, my Medicare card came in the mail yesterday afternoon. On the first of May—three and a half months from today—I will automatically go on Medicare. At that time I’ll want to sign up for a Medigap policy.

According the the reams of paperwork I have here, Medigap insurers cannot zap you for whatever pre-existing condition they can dream up if you have “no gap in coverage” with your prior insurance.

“No gap in coverage.” That is exactly the ADOA rep’s wording. She said, “Don’t worry. You have no gap in coverage between your state insurance and COBRA,” even if you’re not paying the first few premiums.

So. Because Medicare starts less than six months from the start of my COBRA coverage, in theory if I never paid a penny in COBRA premiums, I still would be covered right up until the time the government program takes over, and, because I would have “no gap in coverage,” the private sharks who run the Medigap insurance programs would be unable to screw me because 20 years ago I broke a wrist when I fell on the rocks in the bottom of Aravaipa Canyon while hauling a 30-pound backpack.* And there would be nothing they could do to claim the stress attacks engendered by working for Our Beloved Employer are some sort of excuse for why they shouldn’t cover me.

This sounds too good to be true. But it gets better!

As dawn cracked, I got on the phone to Medicare and tried to formulate this question for the rep who answered: Is it true that if I don’t pay for COBRA I would still be “covered” technically so that I could get Medigap without being zinged for pre-existing conditions.

Irrelevant, says she. Here’s the deal: When you turn 65, you have six months of open enrollment, during which time you can select a Medigap provider who has to take you without regard to pre-existing conditions.

You catch my drift, right?

If I remain “covered” by COBRA for six months whether or not I’m paying the premiums and I attain Medicare in 3 1/2 months, then effectively what I have here is free health insurance for the next several months. There’s no reason for me to pony up the $200/month COBRA premium.

Eight hundred dollars would just about cover the increase in power and water bills over the summer—my combined bills go up by about $200 a month during June, July, August, and September.

With enough in the bank to pay the summertime utility bills, my 2010 budgeting problems disappear into the overheated desert air.

My health is excellent. Except for my neurosis about Arizona State University, I have no health problems at all. I often go six months to a year without seeing a doctor. So it makes good sense to take a chance—especially since no real risk is involved—and quietly not pay the COBRA premiums unless something drastic happens.

Meanwhile, because in direct contradiction to my contract the state carried me on its payroll until January 10, they deposited another $517 into my checking account! This happened because, contrary to what HR told me, in the two December 31 paychecks PeopleSoft did not pay off everything ASU owed me: the five hundred bucks represents pay for the two days in December that I worked past the final 2009 lagging pay period.

I think I’ll be able to argue that this is 2009 pay, so that Social Security will not ding me for it—although from the blank looks I’ve gotten from ASU functionaries about this matter, it’s pretty clear that no help in proving it will be forthcoming from those quarters. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Let’s see here… $800 + $517…that’s $1,317 of money happening!

*No joke! Blue Cross/Blue Shield once actually told me it would not cover me for any broken bones or back problems because they believed the hairline wrist fracture and a later X-ray of a foot showing mild osteopenia meant I had osteoporosis (even though I decidedly did not and still do not).

What a day!

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Well, it’s almost tomorrow, so I’m gunna write this tonight (Wednesday), let it post tomorrow, and take a day off from scribbling to continue the various gardening projects.

Back from choir a little after 9, a cloud cover blown in on the nighttime air and a very light sprinkle starting to spit. Naturally, Cassie the Corgi was not wrung out after her 6:00 p.m. dinner, so grabbed an umbrella and the leash and set out for a late evening constitutional.

Driving home I’d seen some lightning off in the distant east but didn’t think much of it. The day was clear as a proverbial bell and I didn’t expect any rain would blow in. As we reached the apogee of our stroll the sprinkle began to come a little harder (Cassie hates rain!). We’re about as far as we usually get from the house when a big bolt of lightning C-R-A-A-C-K-s out of the sky with a clap of thunder bold enough to knock you off your feet! It was really close, certainly this side of the mountains a mile to the north.

Holy Mackerel! And there we are with a fine metal-ribbed umbrella in our paws!

We sprinted for the house, dog and human at a dead run (did you know you can run pretty well in Danskos?) and just reached the eaves over the front door as water began to pour out of the sky.

So that was a rousing end to another trying day.

Up at 3:00 a.m. worrying about the COBRA and money. If because of a bureaucratic screw-up my termination date goes into the system after December 31, am I going to lose out on the ARRAS discount? If so, then I can’t afford to buy ASU’s health insurance, and because of the ominous stress attack that landed me in the ER for a day because it so cleverly mimicked a heart attack, there’s no chance I can buy insurance on the private market. Though I have enough cash in my checking account, even after sending my excess savings off to the financial dudes for 2009 and 2010 Roth contributions, that money is earmarked for me to live on, not for some insurance company to rip off. If I spend it on $600 or $700 premiums over the next five months, there won’t be enough for me to live on without drawing down several thousand dollars from the IRA, exactly what we’re trying to avoid in an effort to recover the losses of the past 18 months or so.

And speaking of retirement funds, what about the $500 from the Fidelity 403(b) that now is not going to show up this month, thanks to yet another screw-up on the part of my beloved former employer? When I sent that cash off to the Roth, I’d figured on getting the drawdown and using it to help fund my January/February budget. How the hell am I going to get by without that five hundred bucks?

And speaking of the enforced drawdown from the 403(b), the one mandated so that the state will cough up the $19,000 of unpaid sick leave (RASL) it owes me, if those idiots screwed up entering my termination date in the state’s system, that means the ornery RASL lady also thinks I’m still on the payroll. That means she’s not processing my RASL application. And that means an even longer delay in stumbling through that procedure. The longer it takes her to do that, the longer I’ll have to take a drawdown, and the longer it will be before I can move the 403(b) money over to my financial managers, who just now are doing a great deal better with the big IRA than Fidelity is with the 403(b) funds.

{moan!} Got up, wrote the post you may have read Wednesday, dorked around online for a while, wrote a list of things to do. Went back to bed just before dawn. Got up again around 8:30 or 9:00. Sat down at the desk and got back on the phone.

First I called the Department of Administration again, reaching a new CSR. Explained the story again. She opened the payroll system while she was on the phone and said I was still shown as employed at ASU.

I said HR Lady claimed there was a “delay in the payroll system” and she intended to get in touch with DOA on Thursday. That would be tomorrow.

DOA Lady said she didn’t know about that, but she repeated that the HR system shows me as not terminated. She then remarked that DOA has no direct contact with ASU’s HR department. “They never call us on the phone,” said she.

No. Of course not. Why am I not surprised?

Eventually, I called my former husband, a corporate lawyer, to ask what he thought I should do about this, if he could suggest any regulatory recourse, and if he could refer me to a labor lawyer.

He said he didn’t know much about that sort of thing, but he did give me the name of a guy in town, a man whose name I recognized as a fellow with a reputation as a heavy hitter. Then, on reflection, Ex-DH observed that the university’s present general counsel is one of his former law partners. He suggested I should get in touch with that gentleman, since the business with the COBRA is a federal issue that could pose a fairly serious problem for ASU.

I said I doubted if he would remember me. He said maybe not, but he certainly would remember Ex-DH. I should call, remind him that I’m Ex-DH’s former wife, and tell him what is going on. Given that it’s extremely unlikely I could get past the gatekeepers in the general counsel’s office, we agreed I should try e-mailing him.

Meanwhile, Ex-DH suggested, I should e-mail and snail-mail a history of this to someone at ASU and someone at ADOA, so as to get it in writing (again!) that I was supposed to be terminated as of December 31. He said that time is now an issue.

Oh, God.

So I spent about an hour boiling the story down into as brief a form as possible, without all the flourishes one finds in blog copy and without the expressions of distress, annoyance, and cajoling one emits around the HR functionaries. Then I spent another hour writing a short history of the COBRA fiasco. This I addressed to HR Lady and cc’ed to Dean Debby (former supervisor) and the college’s Business Office Manager, adding that I hoped to see the mess cleared up within 24 hours. This little tome took BOM’s name in vain, when, among other things, I reported that during the November retiree meeting we were asked to attend, we were told to ask our departmental BOM to submit a “retire employee” request through the manager self-service system, no later than the last pay period, and that BOM had accordingly done exactly that.

Time passed. I went up to Home Depot to buy some compost and manure, the better to cultiver mon jardin. Then I spent what little remained of the afternoon pruning the roses in back and digging the fresh dirt into the soil around them, weeding the vegetables, and giving them some of the smelly new dirt, too. Along about 5:00 I remembered that tonight was choir rehearsal and realized I’d better wash the eau de cow coprolite off before leaving the house. Raced to draw a bath and toss some dog food down. Checked the e-mail while I was running around: nary a word from General Counsel.

Suspicions confirmed: university lawyers are not friends to university peons, not even if the peons are ex-wives of ex-partners. But…

Comes 5:30 p.m., my hair is wet and the bathtub is draining and the dog is running around and I’m freezing, wrapped in a damp towel, because of course it’s darned cold in here with no heat on, the phone rings and there’s HR Lady!

She’s calling, she says brightly, to let me know that ADOA finally does have my termination in its system (isn’t that great!). She will, she says, send me written confirmation of this tomorrow, but she thought I’d like to know it tonight.

Indeed.

Well, say I, what about the $200 I was supposed to have paid to COBRA by December 8, while I actually was still very much on the payroll and was still paying into the state health insurance system? (That would be the payment you never heard of, the one you said I shouldn’t have had to pay anyway…)

She will try to find out about that and report the results tomorrow, too.

Huh. Imagine that.

I figure either Dean Debby or General Counsel lit a fire under HR, given that HR Lady said she wouldn’t even get to my little problem before tomorrow. It’ ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Do they have me as terminated on December 31? Or will they decide that I died departed today, January 13, since that would have been the date the late great exit was entered in their system?

Will they refuse to enroll me in COBRA until I pony up the 200 bucks they demanded last month, which I forgot about in the confusion and general anguish that went on over the past several weeks?  And if they demand that I pay that, will they also demand another couple hundred bucks for the January premium, bringing the total gouge to an unmanageable $400?

If so, where will I get the $400, since I had to pay $200 for the late great pool maintenance?

Thank God for choir. Rehearsal was challenging, as it involved a rather dramatic piece in Latin (oh, don’t we love DRAMA? 🙄 ) that I had never heard before. We got a new second alto, conveniently pushing the retired priest’s wife into the seat next to me. This lady has a good voice: she can carry a tune, she sings on key, and she sings loud enough to hear her. That’s all I need to fake success. So it was fairly easy for me to figure out the new music. And the mental workout went a long way toward taking my mind off the current spate of GDU hassle.

What a day. What a place.

Storm image: FIR002, flagstaffotos.com.au Lightning strike, January 2007
Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License
Please note that this image is not in the public domain and must be used and acknowledged accordingly.

Flypaper: It gets stickier!

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So yesterday I flew into a rant over the latest screw-ups from the Great Desert University. Here’s an update:

LS at Fidelity left word on my voicemail while I was out running around. She wanted me to call her back to communicate some unspecified information. Of course, by 2:00 our time her East-Coast office was closed. Reached B— H—, who couldn’t figure out from the notes she left what she intended to ask. Again (again, again, again!!!!!) I rehearsed my story. He discovered that the EFT arrangement to deliver the small monthly drawdown required to qualify me for the $19,000 sick-leave payout the state owes me had never been made, because Fidelity had never received the routing information.

This was part of the eight-page form I was required to run past GDU’s HR people. The first thing the idiot who took the form off my hands did, even before she walked away from me, is rip the canceled check I’d stapled to the first page off. I said, “Please don’t remove that from the form. Fidelity asked for it and needs it so they can set up an electronic forms transfer.” Said she, “I have to Xerox it.”

You can’t just fold back the check on the first page, copy it, set it aside, and then run the other 7 pages through the photocopier’s feeder? Obviously, the stupid woman failed to reattach the canceled check.

BH asked it if was OK to process a paper check. Then in the next breath he said he had no idea whether Fidelity would send said check this month.

Next, CS at ASU’s astonishing HR department called and said the reason COBRA thinks I’m still employed by the State of Arizona is that there were “system delays in the payroll process.” She claimed to have “scheduled time” on Thursday to confer with the Department of Administration folks and said she would get back to me then.

The upshots:

1. I will not get the $500 drawdown I had worked into this month’s budget, so I will be $500 short between now and the middle of February, when the first Social Security check is supposed to arrive.

2. And I now have no health insurance coverage!

I’m going to give these morons until Thursday to sort this mess out, and then I’m going to file a formal complaint. This has gone on too long.

Carnival of Money Stories comin’ our way

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Funny hosts the Carnival of Money Stories next Monday! Don’t forget to send your contributions through this handy link.

Hmmm… Looks like the Carnivals server is down again. If you can’t get through today, keep trying. The deadline is Sunday afternoon.

Looking forward to reading lots of creative money posts!

Trying to escape from flypaper

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Getting quit of Arizona State University and the State of Arizona is like trying to pull yourself free of a giant sheet of heavy-duty, extra-sticky flypaper. Below, notes on this morning’s exchanges with a Fidelity 403(b) rep, a Department of Administration rep, and (god help me) another ASU Human Resources rep:

Called Fidelity to find out where the $500 payment is. Reached L— S—.

She said there are two funds, one with $159,000 and a smaller one. She asked which one I wanted to withdraw from. I said I had no idea, having been through several reps, all of whom said they would make this happen.

She said the smaller one is available for any drawdown from me. The larger one requires paperwork proving that I no longer work for the state university system and approval.

She said they did receive the 8-page form from ASU but it is in process at Fidelity. She will e-mail the person in that department and call me back to report what’s going on.

Meanwhile, I haven’t received a bill from COBRA. Called ADOA. Reached a woman who didn’t identify herself. She said

a) I was supposed to have sent a check to HITS (how appropriate!) and I have not. I looked in my notes and discovered I was supposed to have sent a $199.14 check and, in my endless confusion over this f***ing nightmare, failed to do so. But this would not matter, because…

b) ASU has not entered me in the HRIS system, and so as far as ADOA is concerned, I am still employed by ASU and still covered.

LS said I need to call HR again and do battle with them. I have to tell them to enter me in HRIS and then find out from them what date they show me terminated. Then I have to call ADOA back and tell them what the date is. Then they will figure out what to do about COBRA.

I called C— D— at HR. She said I am entered in HRIS as terminated. I said ADOA said I was not entered.

She was mystified about the COBRA prepayment due in December. I said that was what ADOA told me, and that I had failed to make the payment because I was overwhelmed by the paperwork and hoop-jumping, which has now accrued a two-inch thick binder of paperwork and notes. She said there is no such payment; that she couldn’t speak for ADOA but she knows the system, and they have to send me a bill for any amounts owed. I said what I told her was what they  told me. Twice.

CD said the termination went into the system on January 6, and it usually takes about 24 hours for it to register. She also said that because I wasn’t canned until the 31st, several days in to the first January pay period, I would have been covered by ASU’s regular plan until the 10th. I pointed out that today is January 12, and so presumably I now have no insurance coverage.

She said well, do I have any health issues? I said I need to go to the dentist. She asked if I have an appointment today.

I said, “Look. I have to get in my car and drive from one end of Hell to the other today. If I get in an accident and end up in the hospital without coverage, I will be bankrupted!”

She said COBRA has a six-month period in which you can enroll, so if I get hurt or sick in that period I can retroactively enroll.

She offered to call ADOA and tell them I was “termed” in their system six days ago and to find out what the story is with the COBRA. I said I will be running around the city all day—I’m now over an hour late in getting started and haven’t even had breakfast!—so she said she would find out what she can and leave word on my voicemail.

Will this horror show never stop????