A Very Poor Story...

I want to tell you all a story. It's a story about a man and woman who recently had the joy of finding themselves soon-to-be parents. Although they were very poor college students, they understood that they could receive help from the government to pay for all the expenses of having a baby through a wonderful program called...Medicaid. The woman dutifully applied to Medicaid and many other government programs that are aimed to help poor pregnant women. All the program immediately accepted her and got her started on what she needed to get done...all except Medicaid.

Okay, you all know this story is about me, so I'll just switch and tell you about the oh so interesting time I had today. We still hadn't heard anything from Medicaid and were starting to get a little worried about it. Today, I went to the mailbox on my way to the car to go shopping and there was a letter from Medicaid. My first thought was "Finally!" I opened it and stopped dead in my tracks, for it was a letter of denial because I "failed to complete the application process". Apparently they didn't receive the new application I sent in with everything they needed on it. Attached to the denial was a Second Notice for the information they needed (which, by the way, I never got seperately). Now, I will take blame for the first notice. We were in the middle of moving when the first notice came and I decided to wait until after we were done to take care of it. But I sent everything in again and they were still denying me! So, instead of going shopping, I went straight the Medicaid office to try to straighten everything out. To make a long story short, they told me to get the information listed on the Second Notice and take it over to Ed Jenkins' office to get it all taken care of. So, I did. But Mr. Jenkins' office is somewhere within Utah Valley Regional Hospital, with no indication of where. In frustration, I went back home and called his office number, got directions of where to find him, went back to UVRH and finally sat down to talk with him about my situation. He took the information I brought with me and started entering numbers in a computer. For those of you who don't know, Medicaid looks at two things: 1. Your income for the month that you applied (which here meant Nov) and 2. Your total assets for the month you applied (meaning our bank accounts, as we have no other assets and our car was exempt). Well, we more than qualified where our income was concerned, but we were $177 over the $5000 limit for our assets. $177. I nearly broke down right there. He asked if we received any government help for school, that could take that off the total. I told him we did, but I couldn't remember how much or when it came. He told me not to despair, to bring him the same information for December tomorrow and he would put that in instead. I thought "There's no way that we will be over $5000 for December. We were exceeding our income before, we have to be under." So, I left in good cheer, thinking all would resolve itself. (For those of you good at seeing what's coming...here it comes.) I called Tyler and asked him to print out the same information for December, and to check it to make sure that it was under $5000. He called me back and said that we were still over...much more over this time than last time. I couldn't believe it. How did that happen??? Ahhh...the FAFSA! It came mid November, so by December 1, our assets had jumped $1300. Well, Ed had told me that didn't count towards the final number, and with that taken off, we were well under the limit. *WHEW*. My stress levels have been sky-rocketing all day because of this, but it seems to be working out now. Tomorrow I will take the information back to Mr. Ed Jenkins and hopefully (keep your fingers crossed) that will be the end of it. I will be covered by Medicaid and all will be right in the land again...Please pray for us tonight that all really does work out tomorrow. I'm still a little nervous about it after all I've been through today.