fucking God awful time to be up in the morning dragging my wife all he way to the Royal Alex for a 10am appointment. I’m up doing the cbi thing anyway and its hard to go back to sleep when I’ve got to be up at 8am anyway. All for what to go their, watch Dr. M get all frustrated with me and to say “The specialist will take over from here. You’re to call her office to set up something else. See you at the April 14^th follow up. It’s lunch. Got to run, by.” I feel like canceling and call the specialist’s office up anyway   This is a waste of my time, Dr. M’s time. Now we got to haul ourselves over there just for him to tell us the above. So now we have to wait from Jan 10^th to March 6^th for this. Now I’ve got to call the specialists office and find out what’s next. Most likely this will involve another consultation May something and most likely the next option will be July something. It’s called socialized medicine folks. The yag thing is probably a whole shopping cart list of procedures that for all I know cover the course of years. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. I should just go back to bed and cancel and call the specialist’s office up at 1:30pm something for the next thing. I feel like I’m a fucking make work project. And you Americans are envious of our socialized medicine? Yeah right.

Let me tell, you, (Rant alert) if it wasn’t for all the hoops my wife and I have to go through every spring to “qualify” for Alberta Health and Wellness (AHW) subsidy we’d be forking out $40 bucks/month, which would come out of our pay cheaques every month. I only work part time so this would mean I’d have to work a couple of extra shifts just to cover the cost. First nail biter wait is wait for the T4 slips from head office, usually the end of February. Next wait for the low-income community tax preparation office to open. That’s another early morning long wait. Take a number kind of a thing. They file to Winnipeg tax office and then we wait. Another nail biter then a month late (depending on the mail) we both go to AHW with our “letter” of assessment and take another number and wait to see a representative who crunches the numbers if see if we qualify. I think for singles it’s $12,500 Gross. Couples, it’s a bit more. Then they file it with AHW and our respective employers and hopefully if we’re lucky like last year we end up avoiding all of this but in the meantime all we do is wait. I don’t like it because if we don’t catch it early I get it deducted from my cheaque $44 bucks/2weeks until our employer sees, “Oh yes they have subsidy.” This means that if I don’t catch this early AHW begin to take this off my cheaque every 2 weeks. That’s $88 bucks a month. Sure I get it back the next pay cheaque but this cut’s into out bottom like right now. Now for my American readers let me ask you folks, what do you pay for monthly medical coverage? Half a million, one or two maybe? And what do you half to pay for on a monthly basis? $50-100 month? I doubt you have to go through as much hoops as we do to qualify for subsidy. And the thing is, if you have the coverage you can be seen right away. None of this wait 6 weeks bs. Sure maybe not everyone can get coverage but you still have a better medical system then we do because there’s less waiting. Sure I’d get free medical coverage if I was on welfare but there is no such thing here in Alberta where there are plenty of jobs.

Anyway that’s my rant on the subject. I could go further but I’ve got to go get ready, have a shower clean up to go play the waiting game. If by some miracle, the yag actually works for me today then I will be completely surprised but I have my doubts and I think my wife and I would have come home this afternoon empty handed.   

e. Jim