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…live in Washington DC many years ago. I had really crappy health insurance, and I was hesitant to use it.

Why? Because the way it worked was that you had to file a claim, and a reimbursement check would be mailed…not to the patient, but to the company plan administrator. This was at a law form, of all places. I worked there, and the company administrator was a Raving Bitch From Hell. She was also a nasty gossip.

The problem was that she had to open all of the checks to see who they were for…and the stubs came out and said what medical treatment was given. Whose business is that, but the patient’s?

Anyhoo, this one woman had what was noted on the stub as a *pregnancy termination*, and the insurance covered it. The Raving Bitch From Hell saw this, and she started gossiping all over the office about it, saying that this woman was a slut, got knocked up, and went and had an abortion. And maybe she did. Not all women who have abortions are sluts, though, maybe the birth control failed, and she simply didn’t feel fit to have a child. The woman in question here had one kid already, she was single, and was struggling financially with the one she had.

Or maybe she had a health issue that prohibited her from carrying another child to term, and the abortion was medically necessary. I don’t know, and unlike The Raving Bitch From Hell, I feel that it is none of my business. I fully support a woman’s right to choose, for any reason.

But the bitch had to go and tell all of her office buddies all about *Joy’s* abortion, even before Joy collected her check. It was all over the office within an hour, and poor Joy was so humiliated…she didn’t want people to know about whatever it was that happened.

And that was her RIGHT. It’s just too bad that there were no Washington DC medical malpractice lawyers who would handle cases like this…idiot insurance companies who require checks to be sent through the company’s admin, as well as people like the bitch who gossip about what should be PRIVATE information. This sort of thing, in my opinion, is just as much medical malpractice as a doctor who screws up. Joy’s future at the firm was pretty much destroyed by all of the gossip, she left because it got to be too much, and I don’t know what happened to her after that.

The laws have since changed. When Mike was working for Evil Bossman, who was big into family and kids, he decided to get a vasectomy. We knew that Evil Bossman would give him all manner of hell if he caught wind of the fact that we’d not be making any Mikelets or whatever. But now, the health plans simply identify patients by number, and they don’t let the employer who pays for the health plan know who got what procedure done. In fact, the employers never know about ANY procedures but their own and that of their families. And that is the way it SHOULD be.

Mike took the day off, a Friday, simply saying that he was going in for *minor surgery*. Bosses are not legally allowed to ask for the details, so he was able to leave it at that. The insurance paid for it, and nobody knew except me, Mike, the urologist who did it, and the insurance company. No stupid reimbursement checks sent to the boss, no nothing.

As much as today’s healthcare sucks, there are some good things about it, such as the right to privacy.