Thursday, December 20, 2007

My months of Hell and drugs…


My months of Hell and drugs…

When I read the post from Jeff Bell about his experiences with his problems with the Healthcare system, I almost cried.

To provide a little background, my wife and I started a Medical Billing and consulting company in 1980. My wife was heavily involved with MGMA, and received CME the early 1990’s. After nearly 20 years our business had grown to operations in Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Utah.

In 1999 we were approached by WebMD Corporation about selling our company to them. I hired the best experts and attorneys to handle the transaction. The purchase was partly cash and the majority was stock in WebMD. Because I was an insider, I was restricted from selling my stock for 1 year. During that year WebMD stock soared to $90+ dollars a share. Then the dot com boom crashed, and when I was finally able to sell my shares, the price had fallen to $17.00 per share. My deal had a strike price of $47.00 so I lost $30.00 per share.

I thought I was financially independent one minute, and then saw my retirement nest egg get cracked, broken, and disappear.

Realizing that my wife an I needed to start over, my wife applied for Law School and was accepted. She graduated this spring and is now the managing associate for a downtown firm.

In order to survive, I took jobs with Harmons, Lowes, and The Home Depot. This provided just enough to pay our bills and provide good benefits. Earning a wage that I was paid 20 years earlier, and having supervisors 30 years younger has been a challenge. But I needed the health care insurance. I have an untreatable kidney disease (PKD) and am uninsurable with any small or individual plan. Working for a large company like The Home Depot provided a way to get the benefits I needed, and to try to rebuild my retirement. I love working at THD and I love helping customers with their projects, so even though my pay is low, I always had fun.

On October 10th however that would change. While lifting and stocking 10 ft sections of electrical pipe, suddenly my lower left flank screamed out. I continued to finish the job and worked the rest of my shift but the pain was getting worse and worse. I went home thinking there was something wrong with my left kidney. At around 3am the pain was so bad I had to go to the ER. Explaining my kidney condition, they said that I should see my doctor as soon as possible and have a CT scan. 3 Injections of pain meds and 2 oral pills was what it took to allow me to go back home.

I had the CT scan the next day, but LDS hospital forgot to get a pre authorization. United Healthcare will not pay for the procedure. The CT scan ruled out any problem with my kidney, but my doctor could see my back having muscle contractions. Subsequent MRI and X-ray and another trip to the ER showed that my back suffered a traumatic injury. I have never had any back problems ever and this has been the first time to experience back pain.

I was put on medical leave and thought I was going to be taken care of. Then the company that administers workman’s comp for The Home Depot denied my claim. Fortunately I had short and long term disability insurance. But Metlife after seeing the X-Ray, MRI, etc says this is a workman’s comp injury.

So now my wife has taken my case and we will likely have to litigate. I sent a message to Jeff Bell that if he needed any legal help from someone who is an expert in medical reimbursement to call me.

I’m currently taking 4 pain medications and being treated with PT. I’ve now been off work for nearly 4 weeks, and I still can barely walk. I cannot pick up anything, or twist. It will be interesting what happens with this.

On another note, several Utah Bloggers have called me some pretty nasty things. These are seen by my mother and kids. I have shown privately information to refute all these allegations, but have never received a retraction from anyone but Rob Miller.

You guys know who you are. So basically my life sucks right now and the only thing I can do is blog and watch TV.

Mark

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That really sucks Mark. I hope things get better.

Jesse Harris said...

First off, I'm sorry to hear you've had a crappy time the last few months. Health problems are no fun at all and I thank my lucky stars we've had decent insurance through it all. I do, however, have some thoughts on your aside.

I seem to recall being called a liar, thief, jackass and idiot by you on various occasions as well as being told to pull my head out of my ass. There's also been dozens of thinly veiled threats about what you'll do with various persons IP addresses and identities. I think you've rightfully engendered a heaping helping of ill will from most of us in the blogging community. (After all, we have wives and families too.) It does no good to play victim. If you simply said "hey, let's bury the hatchet and try and start over", I for one would be willing to give you that benefit of a doubt. Seriously.

All we're asking is that you don't threaten people and call them nasty names. It's built up a bad rap (you saw the comments on the SL Weekly website) and it'll take a long time for you to shake it off. After that e-mail exchange we had the other day, I know there must be a decent person in there somewhere.

We won't ever see eye-to-eye on the spamming and part of that public participation is that you know you're going to take heat for it. I don't like it and, if the reaction from bloggers and blog readers is any indication, they don't much care for it either. Remember that think skin you're always talking about? It's time to use it.

Mark E. Towner said...

Jesse,

Thanks for your concern about my health problems, it gives me a new perspective on life and the problems many people have in life just trying to get little things done.

Regarding the second paragraph, you are correct it was very inconsiderate and insensitive of me to say those things about you. For those people who I have had personal interaction with, the first thing they say are “you are nothing like the person portrayed in your blog”. Well that’s because like a lot of people who are in media, what they say and do on air or on their blogs are intentionally provocative. “Get off the phone you stupid dope” comes to mind. Many people in New York look forward to being blown up and then being hung up on. It’s all shtick, to get attention. Just as these radio personalities can be intentionally provocative to increase their listener base, many writers intentionally write provocative articles to get people to read their stuff. Here in Utah, Paul Rolly comes to mind. My blogging persona is like a video game persona, intentionally trying to stir the pot to get people to react. This has been my online shtick since the early eighties. When Yahoo message boards they first came online allowing posting messages about individual stocks, “wallstreetmustang” was born. By stockholders of many different companies my posts were the most hated, but also the most read and replied.

Being a cyber jerk is something I do very well, and in fact many of my clients pay very good money to do it. If they want a story told, issue to be discussed, people to get mad about something, but they don’t want to get their own hands dirty, they hire people like me to get it done. Take for example the Romney attack push poll. Somebody who supports Huckabee wants to take down Romney. They hire a group to take care of it. That group then hires somebody like me to get the job done. My job many times is to get people focused on me, spending their time and energy attacking me, of trying to find dirt on me, taking away time and energy for supporting their cause. It’s like a puppeteer who pulls the strings, and gets people to react. Most of the time it’s not personal, I’m just trying to get the reaction I want.

Now to reveal another truth, “Rob Miller is personally aware of this” many personalities like Jason Bourne, Michael Clayton, etc are family members or related friends. I have a large extended family located all over the world. We all are very active bloggers, and stay in touch via our blogs, family websites, email, and skype. Have you ever wondered how Rob Miller’s blog is always on top of the Blognetnews list. It’s because he has so many authors on Amicus, and that on Saturday night they vote themselves to the top. I’ve also noted spiking being done. This is where someone will intentionally vote a competing blogsite as terrible, to drive down their rating. Just ask the owners of BlogNet News. They can see it happen. So lets all be honest here, a lot of gaming is going on in the Utah Blogging community. Both Rob and I have noticed by looking at our site meters that several comments from “different people” have actually come from the same IP address within a few minutes of each other.

I will end this novel by apologizing to Jesse, I’ve shown him the proof of my subscriber base, as well as others about questions they have privately.