The other day I was looking at my bank account online and saw the Social Security Administration had made an unexpected deposit in my account. The deposit was for the amount normally deducted from my SSDI payment for my Medicare premium. I had no idea why I was receiving that deposit, so I had to call the Social Security Administration to ask about it. Not that I don't appreciate some extra cash, but if they make a deposit in error, at some point they are going to want it back. And if they were refunding my Medicare premium for some reason, I didn't want to discover that unbeknownst to me, my Medicare policy had been cancelled.
If you've never had to telephone the Social Security Administration, well, you're lucky. They have one of those phone trees where they tell you to press one if you are calling about disability, press two if you are calling about Medicare, and so on. You have to work your way through layers and layers of this. They don't tell you what to press if you want to talk to a real live person. But after ten minutes or so, I was informed that my call would be transferred to a customer service representative.
I then was on hold for 17 minutes waiting for someone to assist me. And believe it or not, that's a short hold time when calling Social Security.
It was worth it, though, because when I finally got to talk to a real live person, I was informed that I now qualify for the state to pay my Medicare premium for me. I'm not sure if that's because my income has dropped slightly since last year, due to getting less work from one editor, or because of changes to the Medicaid system thanks to Obama-care, or both. But who cares? This means I'll be receiving almost $100 more each month from SSDI. Which happens to be exactly the amount I've been informed it will cost to care for a dog.
That sure works out nice.
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