Skip to main content

MEDICARE LETTER TO AMERICAN EXPATS, JANUARY, 2019: WHAT TO DO

If you are an American living in France, and if your address with Social Security and Medicare is a French address, you may have recently received a letter advising you that you were going to be issued a new Medicare card. It seems they've decided that having our Social Security numbers on the cards was inappropriate, a potential breech of security. So new cards were being mailed.

Except, of course, new cards would not be mailed to addresses outside of the United States.

Never fear. If you have an account at MyMedicare.gov, you can print an official copy of your card and use it until you are in a position to obtain a new one. If you don't have an account, you can create one. There was another workaround, something about calling Medicare from a mobile phone from within the United States. But since we have no plans to go back to the States in the immediate future, my only ready option was to create that account on MyMedicare.gov.

Except, of course, that I wasn't allowed create an account. Error message. Why? I guessed that it was because off the foreign postal code. That guess turned out to be correct. How do I know? Because, believe it or not, MyMedicare.gov has a 24/7 Chat function. I waited less that a minute. Zach was very clear. That's right. You can't create an account with a foreign address attached. If you already have an account, you can access it from anywhere. But if your address with Social Security is foreign, you are out of luck.

I asked Zach to describe my Catch-22 plight to his supervisor. He said that he would. I asked how to make a formal complaint to Medicare. He advised me to call them directly: 1-800-MEDICARE. Guess what. Available 24/7.

I called. I explained my situation. The agent advised my that they were aware of the problem and were working on it. I asked what I should do in the interim. The answer? Identify yourself to me satisfactorily and I will send you a letter certifying that you are covered that you will receive in ten days. After four weeks, you'll get your new card in the mail.

Who knew that single-payer healthcare could be so efficient?


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

JOE WALSH, RONSTADT, MEEZERS AND MORE - #19

    MEMORABLE CONCERTS - PART 1 I first saw Linda Ronstadt in concert in about 1973 in a little venue in Atlanta called the Great Southeast Music Emporium. I have since seen on various websites that the capacity of the venue was about 540 people. It seemed smaller, a converted shopping center movie house that sold beer by the bucket. Literally. Little metal buckets. Search the name and read about the place. By the time that Cathey and I went to concerts there, some of the acts that they were booking went on to the big time. One such was Linda Ronstadt. Imagine seeing Linda up close and personal in such a small venue, blue jeans and bare feet and with a band that would become the Eagles backing her. Imagine that it's the early show and she's just hit town and she's kinda tired so it's mostly ballads. That voice just a few feet away. Singing love and loss right at you. And imagine, when the show is over, that management comes out and says that, since the second show wasn&

IT'S ME AGAIN - SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CORRUPTION OF DISCOURSE

Drafted months ago. I think I'm going to start writing again.       What happened? On the evening news fifty years ago, like clockwork, millions of folks would watch Walter Cronkite describe daring flights in space while raptly watching grainy video that we would only see once. No VCRs. No YouTube. Perhaps more importantly than his space exploration commentary, Walter's grainy video described the moral complexities of the war in Vietnam. Whether or not we considered either or both of those endeavors noble, we trusted Walter's presentation. He showed us pictures and commented on them truthfully, so we believed. There were other guys sitting in the chairs in the other two networks. They seemed like nice guys. But Walter was the standard, at least in our house. There were the three national networks with just one or two independent stations serious enough to consider in the major media markets back in those days. More locally produced radio and more local, often daily newspape

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look