Friday, October 19, 2012

another day at home

I went for a walk around the track again today.  This time with my neighbor who is on medical leave and hanging out at home recuperating from an injury she sustained over Labor Day Weekend.  Though I can't walk at the pace I am used to, the exercise did me good.  I wasn't sure I should being my allergies are suffocating me but at the same time I know that my body needs the strengthening to my core muscles and the blood flow needs to be generated.  However, nothing I am taking is cutting these blooming allergies, no Allegra, no Singular, no Mucinex, nor my inhalers.  Nothing.  I can barely breath and have a sore throat from having to leave my mouth open to be able to get oxygen.  The drainage down the back of my throat is irritating it too.  If this keeps up, I will have a raging head cold in no time.

The redness of my belly button is much better however I did a treatment of antibacterial ointment last night after a 2nd dose of Tea Tree Oil.  I want to keep any looming infection at bay.

I spent two hours this afternoon working on creating the documents to file a complaint with the Texas Department of Insurance regarding my health insurance policy.  This is not going to be a quick process, no doubt it will probably take about 6 months, but I am hoping that by their intervention to get a decision on my policy turned around.  I have had continuous health insurance coverage since 1990/1991 and have each proof of coverage for those policies that show no lapse in coverage, even for a day.  This means that though my insurance company put a pre-existing condition on my policy when it was issued, they have no right to do so since I never lapsed coverage, per HIPAA regulations, it clearly states a lapse of 63 days or more puts you in position for a pre-existing condition.  In doing further investigation in the legalities of the HIPAA laws, the longest term you can have on a pre-existing condition is 12 months.  So either way you look at it, I should not be withheld treatment.  I probably should have fought this back at the time the policy was implemented, however at that time I was holding on for dear life to my COBRA policy and not knowing how long I would have unemployment, life had other more critical decisions I was working on.  My health insurance agent stated that because I was going from a group health insurance policy to an individual health insurance policy, this is what allowed them to make this policy restriction.  However, from all my research on HIPAA, state laws, along with the federal laws, I don't find this is correct.  Therefore I decided to move forward with an advocate to deal with this.  I mailed the documents on my way home from acupuncture.