I hate bureacrats

Grrrr!!!!!!! I am so mad today I could spit nails. I have always known about bureacracies and the brain-dead loop you can get into with them, but it's been some time since I found myself in the middle of one of their insane catch 22s. Let me reiterate the fun time I have been having over the past two days.

A week or so ago I received a letter from the Social Security Administration saying they will no longer automatically deduct the premiums for my Medicare supplemental insurance plan from my monthly benefit. They did not say why they had made this decision.

Yesterday I received a letter from my service provider telling me that the reason the Social Security Administration had given them was that my benefit was not large enough to cover the premium. My benefit is 10-12 times as large as the premium. This did not make any sense.

I tried to call Social Security. Good luck with that. At first I tried to call my local office. I got two responses from that: in the first I got a recorded greeting, a notice that all their people were busy, and could I please hold. From there after maybe three minutes they apologized and asked me to continue holding. Three more minutes I was automatically sent to a full mailbox, then bounced back to the end of the line. Rinse and repeat endlessly. The second was even more fun. The message said "Thank you for calling the Social Security Administration. Goodbye." Then they hung up on me.

So I called the main office on the toll free line. After maybe half an hour of the most irritating telephone hell you can imagine I got to talk to a real person. She told me that the Medicare people has ordered the stop to the automatic deductions and there was nothing she could do without them telling her to do so.

The Medicare office just kept hanging up on me so I got irritated and stopped trying that. I called my service provider and told them what was going on. They told me that only a letter from the Social Security agency could fix things with them. Back to square one. I had a glass of Scotch and vowed to return to the fight the next day.

I reached the Medicare office the next morning (this morning). They checked their records and said that their records show that the authorization to automatically withhold my premiums was in effect and they had not nor could they tell Social Security to stop payment since they do not know the size of my retirement benefit, so had no way of knowing if it would cover the premiums or not. They sent me back to Social Security.

After endlessly trying to reach a real person in Social Security both nationally and locally I gave up and drove to my local Social Security office. The woman there confirmed that their records show that the automatic deduction had been stopped but there was no reason given. They tried to tell me I had requested it be stopped, but I squashed that one fast. She called Medicare who confirmed that my automatic deduction was valid and fine with them. She confirmed that the Social Security records showed they had ordered the deduction halted. She could not give me a reason and suggested that I should talk to my provider again, who had already sayd they could do nothing.

So here is where I stand. My premiums are not being automatically deducted. Nobody knows why. Nobody ordered it. Nobody requested it. And Nobody can fix it. Nobody has been really busy. My next step is to send a copy of something similar to this rant to my U.S. Senator and as that this be resolved. I need a drink. I need two; they're small.