Vermont’s Catamount health insurance option is truly a wonderful thing for many people who would otherwise have no health coverage.  And I haven’t heard any horror stories about them such as one reads about private insurance companies refusing to pay for medical treatment for people who’ve paid in their premiums faithfully.  But as with any bureaucracy, they have their glitches—and glitches in a bureaucracy involved in matters of life and death can have dire consequences.

There are no dire consequences in the situation I learned about today, thank heaven.  But this kind of thing has the potential for serious harm.

I was catching up on the phone with a friend today who has recently changed jobs.  Part of that change has been her application to Catamount, especially since Cobra is absurdly expensive for her.  Early in the application process, she asked if she should send a particular document along with the rest of her application materials.  The answer was no, they’d just make note of the thing that the document relates to.

And you, my astute readers, have already gotten to the end of the story in your minds.  She’s now going through the application process again, this time including the document that they first said they didn’t need, but now say they do. If they had just taken the dang thing the first time around, she’d have had health insurance weeks ago. Luckily she didn’t need it–wasn’t hit by a car, didn’t even sprain an ankle, didn’t get swine flu.  Again, thank heaven, because any of those things, and many others, could have happened during the extra weeks she wasn’t covered.

All in all not a great humongous bureaucratic slip, because there were no dire results.  Let’s hope Catamount finds its way to minimizing the possibilities for dire consequences.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen