Medi-Cal is a health insurance program offered by the state of California to residents who otherwise would not be able to afford health insurance. It is also available to children and adults with lifelong disabilities. Once your child has such a diagnosis, he or she is eligible for Medi-Cal coverage forever, whether or not he or she is also covered by private insurance.
This is a great thing, because sometimes, when you have a child with special needs, medical and therapeutic interventions are necessary, and the bills that pay for those interventions can quickly pile up and bury a family. When my youngest son had open heart surgery at four and a half months old, followed by a rare complication of surgery that required blood transfusions every two weeks for months, we were very grateful to have the additional coverage provided by Medi-Cal, which paid for the huge deductible from our private insurer for those years. So take it from me: This is a valuable and needed program.
Anyway: Remember how I said that when a doctor diagnoses your child as having a lifelong disability he or she is eligible for Medi-Cal forever? That's true, and it's called institutional deeming. Except somebody has to remind Medi-Cal about how it works.
Every year, in the spring, I receive a packet of about 54 pages of documents from the Medi-Cal people, including information about family planning, how to determine my baby’s paternity, and pages that I don’t understand, because they are in eight different, unfamiliar languages, as well as forms to be filled out, asking all kinds of questions about our income and assets, who lives at our house, my shoe size in 1978, etc. They send all those forms to be filled out because regular Medi-Cal--not the kind for people who are institutionally deemed--is granted based on certain income requirements.
Every year, I'm sorry to get the packet—all those trees!!—and every year, I do the same thing with it. In red ink, I scrawl across the first page "Institutionally Deemed—This Application Is Not Relevant" or some variant, and I mail it back. And then a year goes by and we do the same tarantella again.
Except this past year, Medi-Cal added another pirouette to the dance.
They started billing me, monthly, for another one of my sons. This particular son has not used our health insurance for years. He has a real, grown-up job and he gets his own health insurance as a result. In addition, his income makes him ineligible for Medi-Cal and he is not institutionally deemed. You tell me how he spontaneously landed on the Medi-Cal roster, because I have no idea.
I started writing letters to the Medi-Cal people, explaining what I've just told you, and adding that I do have a different son with a different name who is institutionally deemed.
When those monthly bills started to arrive marked "30 Days Past Due," then "60 Days Past Due," I started stepping up my letter writing.
Over the course of a year, I've received two letters in response, explaining that the Medi-Cal people are thinking about my case, but they haven't come to any conclusions yet.
More recently, I've received the bills with "90 Days Past Due," and "120 Days Past Due" written across them.
I don't write to Medi-Cal any more—it doesn't seem to be very meaningful. But they keep sending me letters.
What's been particularly intriguing to me, and makes me ask a lot of questions about the Medi-Cal office, such as Who works there? and What do they do all day?, is that the amount due is changing all the time. And I mean in an unfettered, ricocheting kind of way, not in a linear way. So one time, a bill might be for $26, while the next one is for $70, and the one after that is for $58.