Why health care reform matters for this Baby Boomer

I'll tell you a story about my own health insurance to underscore why I think it's important for President Barack Obama, his policy makers and Congress find some common ground to fix it.

First off, I don't have the kind of health concerns that keep me and my family up at night. No cancer. No heart problems. No diabetes.

I'm an aging Baby Boomer who's in good health but with some medical issues that test the efficiency of this nation's health care system and test my patience.

Since my retirement, I've been on my wife's health plan. It's a so-so plan through her employer ... not as good as the coverage I had when I was working, but not as bad as having nothing.

The plan has a deductible of $500 and it requires a co-insurance of 20 percent up to a maximum of $3,000 per year. That means that my out-of-pocket expense can be $1,100 a year ... and that's on top of co-pays of $20 per visit and on top of cash out of pocket for any care that the insurance company just won't cover.

By giving its employees a so-so plan, the employer saves money. It's expensive to give employees a real good plan.

Again, it's better than having no insurance at all, but frustrating nevertheless: To have insurance, but to have insurance that requires a lot of cash on my part.

And a lot of effort on my part to manage.

I had a test done in a local hospital in December 2008, ordered by my primary care physician. The data from the test required the interpretation of a specialist. The specialist went through the data, then made a report to me and my doctor.

Everybody then made their submissions to the health insurance company -- the hospital, my primary doctor and the specialist. The health insurance covered the test, but I still started writing checks -- toward the $500 deductible, toward the 20 percent co-pay, etc.

Even though they covered the test, they rejected the specialist's bill.

So now I'm on the phone to the health insurance company: Why was this bill rejected when the procedure was covered? We need more information, I was told. What exactly do you need? Patient history and physical, I was told.

And then I'm on the phone to the specialist: Do you have the information that the insurance company needs? No, I'm told.

And then I'm on the phone to my doctor: The specialist doesn't have this information, do you have it?

Yes, the doctor has the information but won't fax it to the insurance company for me. I have to do it. We'll mail you the information, I'm told, then you can send it to the insurance company. I get the information five days later -- my patient history, my physical. I read it all. I love my doctor, but it's true -- they have lousy handwriting (though I shouldn't be one to talk).

And then I call the insurance company about where to mail the information: Make sure you send it to the attention of Medical Review, I'm told when given the address.

Ten days later, I'm still waiting to hear about the claim. Meanwhile, the bill from the specialist is past due. And I'm waiting, trying to be a patient patient. And I'm hoping he'll wait too, that he'll be a patient doctor and not put me into collection.

The point is that updating the nation's health care system, getting patient records online would help this situation. The military will be the first to get electronic health records, according to an announcement earlier this month.

It won't cure the out-of-pocket expenses that I think are too steep in lousy health plans like mine. But the ability of my insurance company to access my records online would have saved everyone the time, inefficiency and aggravation of having to chase them down.

The hope is that the efficiency drives down some costs.

As I said, this example isn't anything major. It's just symptomatic of a much bigger problem out there that the politicians have to fix once and for all.

Ice out means start of spring, sort of

We have a tradition up here in northern New England called "Ice Out" that is more a harbinger of spring than the equinox.

It's when the M/S Mount Washington cruise ship can navigate Lake Winnipesaukee safely between her New Hampshire ports, unimpeded by ice. "Ice Out" has an official declarer, aviator Dave Emerson who flies over the route regularly until he sees that indeed the ice is out of the lake.

For 2009, he declared "Ice Out" this past Sunday the 12th at noon.

Spring had begun ... well, maybe not yet.

My winter in southern New Hampshire was just a little longer than the winter up there a couple of hours on the lake.

For my own purposes, "Ice Out" is when the ice is totally clear of my driveway. And that didn't happen until Tuesday, April 14, at 1:45 p.m.

Granted, there's still lots of snow in certain areas. Heck, if you feel like it you can still ski late into spring and early summer, depending on the snow pack in Tuckerman Ravine (pictured here on Monday courtesy of the Mount Washington Avalanche Center). The ravine with its incredibly steep headwall is a natural bowl near the peak of Mount Washington that collects feet and feet of snow.

So, if snow and ice are the measure of winter you can find it up here for a while yet.

But now that the ice is out of my driveway my spring has sprung.

The shovels are stored in the garage and I swept a winter's worth of sand from the driveway. I took the ski rack off the roof of the car and I put the golf bag and the golf gear in the trunk. With spring in New England you never know when a golf game might break out. I've learned that you have to take it when you can get it because the golf season passes oh so quickly.

The surfboard rack will go up on the car's roof soon enough. I'm a fair weather surfer, so I need the ocean temperature to get up somewhere in the 50s before I venture in.

Right now the water temp is 42 degrees.

Trust me, it still feels like winter in the ocean and frankly it rarely feels like summer in the waters off northern New England. But we'll take what we can get.

Have time, will travel

Here's one advantage to my being semi-retired while my wife Jane continues to work away in the salt mine: I get to be the eye-candy when I tag along with her on a business trip.

It was a role reversal to be sure. During my working life, Jane would often accompany me on business trips. A recent trip to Alabama was my first opportunity to tag along with her. She went to meetings. I went to the golf course.

I blogged recently on the do's and don'ts of being eye candy.

The point here is that one of the consequences of retirement and the empty nest is having the time and making the time to travel. And it's all made easier by the fact that technology makes it possible to stay connected to the part-time writing I've been doing to fill in the gaps of my semi-retirement.

I contribute to four blogs, writing about 15 posts a week on cooking, Baby Boomer issues and New Hampshire politics.

Being on the road with Jane gave me the best of both worlds. She worked and I played. And I worked around my play.

I look at travel as a form of continuing education. And what an education we received during our tour of Birmingham.

The city was once considered the most segregated in the country, a city where the separation of blacks and whites, the so-called "separate but equal" doctrine was played out for decades after the city arose from literally nothing soon after the Civil War.

In my years, I wasn't exposed to the kind of segregation that was so ingrained in Birmingham. I'd read about it growing up, heard about it on the news. But a tour of the Civil Rights Institute and some other civil rights sites in Birmingham gave me a peek at a way of life that, while foreign to me, was all too familiar for so many.

Voting rights subjugated. "Colored Only" bathrooms and drinking fountains and a way of life dictated by whites. Protests and demonstrations put down by police dogs and fire hoses. The fire bombing of homes. The bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four girls died.

The attainment of civil rights was a civil war of its own.

Has it improved? Segregation is illegal, but like most cities, Birmingham is segregated by poverty. There are the business districts and the areas of the well-to-do, and there are the impoverished areas inhabited most often by blacks. It was that way in Birmingham.

While segregation is illegal, and the civil rights efforts of the Sixties and Seventies in Birmingham helped make it so, economic segregation is still hard at work.