This morning I had to send my husband off to work with Medicaid paperwork for his employer to fill out. His employer is the head of a two-man business--my husband is the other man.
This paperwork is due Sunday. I doubt it's going to be processed in time to keep our Medicaid from being cancelled--a tired old refrain on this blog. They already have our tax returns, and pay stubs from the last couple of months. Now they'd like a record of my husband's earnings in August and September. You must understand, these forms were mailed on August 30.
Oh, I've finally figured it out. Screw the copy machine and the fax machine, what I really need is a time machine. Forms not turned in on time? Just go back three months and mail them before they're even asked for!
It's embarrassing being poor. My husband gets to tell his boss that our children are on Medicaid. You know, some people look down on people who get government assistance. They see their tax dollars being paid to support people who just, in their opinion, don't work hard enough. It might be easy for some employer, who (and I don't know anything about my husband's boss, really--I've only met him once) may never have been poor, to look at our family and wonder why my husband doesn't work harder, and why I don't work, and why we don't just purchase some insurance for our children.
My husband was willing to work full time, go to school in the evenings, and spend a weekend once a month in the National Guard. But now that he's graduated, there's no job out there, except this one, which doesn't pay very well and only offers part-time hours. So he's making maybe 200-300 a week--way, way below the poverty limit for a family. This job offers no insurance. The Guard does, but with only their insurance, we could never take our children to the dentist, and my daughter's recent trip to the hospital with an ear infection could easily have cost us a couple of week's pay, which we don't have because we just paid our overdue electric bill and got plates for our two used vehicles. Today I get to ask my parents' help with another bill, because there's nothing left.
I just hope that this paperwork doesn't cause my husband trouble at work. I've been in the workplace in the past, and I know how some bosses can be. Especially when you're working at the bottom of the food chain. I actually had an employer many years ago, at a part-time, minimum wage job, insist that I should have health insurance more than once. Of course, this company didn't offer it.
And my husband has had employers in the past state that we could make ends meet if only I would work. We could pay half his paycheck for the company's insurance plan if only I were bringing in another paycheck.
Not to mention the cold, hard fact that it's best not to let employers know how desperate your financial situation is--how desperately you need that job.
It's too bad that the FSSA, in their quest to make sure that we're working as hard as we're supposed to be, has to do things that might actually harm my husband's ability to bring in a paycheck.
Especially since we probably won't make this deadline and we may well have to ask for the very same paperwork again in a couple of weeks.
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