About 3 months ago, my family decided to move from Santa Fe, Texas, a town not far from Houston to Pipe Creek, not far from San Antonio. The area we lived in was full of bad memories, and our trailer had black mold and was in an area with bad air quality, which we thought was a big contributor to my worsening health, so we started looking around for houses. Mom made several trips to different areas around the state to look at houses, and so did my stepdad, David. Eventually, we saw an offer for this house here in Pipe Creek, and it was so good we felt we couldn’t pass it up, so we grabbed it. Pipe Creek is in between San Antonio and Austin, so we really hoped my medical care would be good here, but it’s been anything but.
What My Medical Care was Like Before Moving
I never had great healthcare. I’m on Texas Medicaid, which the government pays for. Many doctors don’t take it, and those that do have often been at teaching hospitals where I would see different doctors each time, or they just weren’t very good. I’ve had health problems for most of my life, and it was always a struggle to get a team of doctors, a primary care provider who would refer me to specialists and coordinate things, and specialist appointments within a reasonable timeframe. It was only in the last few years that I started getting some of this and finding decent doctors. We hoped that when we moved, things would be better. We never imagined that they would be worse.
Preparing for the Move: This Should have Been a Warning
A while Before the move, when my mom and stepdad were in the middle of taking our first loads of stuff to the new house, my mom suggested that I go ahead and tell Social Security and Medicaid about my change of address ahead of time so we could get things moving and start looking for doctors Before we actually moved in. I think this was a couple weeks before we planned to be moved in. When I made the call to Medicaid, they told me that I couldn’t give them a future date for our move. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I told them to put in that day’s date for our move. They didn’t warn me about the possible consequences of this action. This led to my Medicaid getting switched to a new plan for this area sooner than I expected, basically leaving me without health insurance at our old house. I couldn’t go to doctor appointments we had scheduled, and getting my prescriptions refilled was difficult. They also defaulted me to one of the three available Medicaid plans, which might not have been the best one for me. We were also given no information about what was happening with my Medicaid until a little after we were moved in and called to see what was going on, leading us to worry that it had been cut off. Government services like this can be difficult to get back once canceled.
How my Care Has Been Since Moving
Finding Doctors After the Move
Once we got settled in and got information on the Medicaid plan I’d been switched to, we started looking for doctors. I got on the insurance website and looked at provider listings there, but when I called several of them, I found out that the list on the website was extremely out of date. Most doctors listed no longer took Medicaid. I eventually found one doctor who did take it, but she had no appointments available until this month, which was months away at the time.
Hoping to find a sooner appointment, my mom and I called my insurance’s member services phone number and asked for help finding doctors. They searched within a 25-mile radius of us but couldn’t find anything. We then began to look into the other Medicaid plans available, as well as getting help from a patient advocate. We switched me to a plan we thought would be better but still had difficulty finding doctors. Around this time, my mom heard from someone she talked to that I could be getting dual Medicaid and Medicare, and we started looking into that, only to hit a dead end. We found a few patient advocate organizations, but none were much help.
Then, we started the process of getting set up for her to be my paid caregiver. One of the people we talked to from my insurance, who also came out and evaluated me to see how many hours of care I could get, was very nice and agreed to call the doctor we had found and try to get me an earlier appointment. He was able to do this, but we didn’t like the doctor very much. Everything about her office was out of date, and she wasn’t nice to my mom. When we called to make sure the referrals we asked for had been made, they hadn’t even been noted, so the staff didn’t know what we were talking about.
The last paragraph or two is stuff that’s happened in the last couple weeks. Along with this, I’m dealing with trouble getting one of my medications that’s very important. My pharmacy keeps saying it’s too soon, and because of a mix-up that happened at some point, I get enough for three pills a day instead of the five a day I’m supposed to be taking. My mom and stepdad just got me a refill after hours on the phone and paying for it out of pocket, which was money we didn’t have to spend. We also hopefully got me a neurology appointment, again by my stepdad calling and pressuring the doctor. It’s supposed to happen sometime in the next two weeks, although we don’t have the name of the doctor or a date yet. I’ll believe it when we get the call.
Please send thoughts and prayers my way. My headaches make it hard to function for more than 30 minutes to an hour at a time, and I’m in constant pain. I also have other health issues that need treatment. We just need to find a decent primary care doctor who takes my insurance so we can get things moving.