Seventy-five and Counting

I don’t remember who he was other than a prominent doctor with a public platform, but I definitely remember what he said: that 75 is the age most people should die. I’m 76 and I think he’s right.

Samuel Moyne just wrote the book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth—and What to Do About It. He doesn’t advocate killing yourself at 75, but he does think we should all retire, sell our houses, and go into old people’s living communities—with the caveat that the government would spend the money to support these communities—so that young people can have our jobs and houses and get a better start at life. I haven’t had a paying job in 10 years and I’m ready to let my younger son, who has almost nothing, live in my house. But since there’s no nice, gentile living community in Santa Fe that I can afford, my other option is death.

I’m hoping that I just drop dead out in the woods while walking the dogs—they can find their way home without me—or not wake up one morning. But that seems like a long shot. While my outside body is falling apart, my inside body seems to be strong: low blood pressure, good lung capacity, digestive system that works well enough, etc. The outside body is ravaged by arthritis that manifests in bad knees—full knee replacement in one knee—a bad arm, lower back pain, and swollen hands. While my heart and lungs keep me on the trail, my back and knees—they damaged a nerve in my surgery that’s never healed—tell me those days are numbered.

My cultural life is practically non-existent. The only live music I’ve heard in years are the local musicians who play at various venues— small wineries and restaurants—on weekends and special occasions. They’re pretty good and because they’re all old, too, they mostly play the music of our generation: Americana, rock ‘n roll, blues, and a little jazz. I don’t think Samuel Moyne would worry that they were taking away young people’s opportunities: one of the main musicians who plays in several of the bands is the retired local dentist. The rest are longtime residents of these land-based communities who made their living as catch-can, finding work wherever they could while they built their own houses. The houses may have appreciated quite a bit over the years, but they’ll leave them to their children as an enticement to come back to the land.

I didn’t plant a real garden for the first time in probably 50 years. Partly because of the drought—we had no snow last winter—but mainly because I seem to have lost my gardening ability. Last year’s garden was pathetic and this year’s meager plantings in the hoop house are also pathetic. Tomatoes I started inside are tall, straggly looking things and the bell peppers are about six inches tall with tiny little fruits. Only the cucumbers look healthy. And they were all planted in the same organic soil enriched with some store-bought garden soil. So, it’s a pretty sorry sight; somehow those years of institutional knowledge have slipped away.

The only plane trip I’ve taken since my knee surgery was to Oregon, to visit my best friend from high school. She lives on a bay near the ocean so we can go to the beach, eat fish, and experience the cool, humid coast air that keeps my hair curly and hers frizzy. Driving more than three hours in the car is miserable. I have to sit on a donut, as my “pudendal” condition, which I won’t go into, makes sitting on anything soft without the capability of movement, extremely painful. I can be a passenger in the car, as I can move around at will, so when my son asks me to go camping near Silverton, five hours away, I’m game. Camping is my main summer adventure, with my little camper that I bought about six years ago when sleeping on the ground and peeing and pooping in the woods became more difficult.

I’ve been to England once and Spain once and don’t think I could stand another overseas trip. So New Zealand is out. I’ve been invited to go to Mexico with the family at the beginning of next year, which I’ve accepted, assuming I’m not dead before that. Mark and I traveled extensively in Mexico and I’m always up for another visit. I made a couple of trips there after he died, which were just fun, beach adventures, but I wouldn’t mind spending time in Mexico City and maybe taking a couple of side trips to the surrounding colonial cities.

So that’s about it. I’d like to see my grandchildren fledged, but I think the cost is more than I’m willing to pay. I’m not going to make any pledges or predictions, but like I said, 75 is a good number and something to bear in mind as that mind begins its own decline and the body continues to fall apart. There was plenty of living before that—the good, the bad, and the not too ugly—so you can go gently into that good night.

Medigap Woes

Scrolling through Facebook there’s often a good looking “senior citizen” earnestly addressing the rest of us senior citizens on Medicare that we’re tired of the recent increases in the cost of our Medigap policies. And they even mention Medigap Plan G—the plan I’m on—as the target of these price gouges. For those of you who aren’t senior citizens, Medigap means the private insurers—United Health Care, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Humana—who cover the gaps in Medicare medical payments. Yes, Medicare has many gaps that need to be filled in if you don’t want to end up paying a lot of money after a hospitalization or a doctor’s visit.

Let’s quit lobbying for “Medicare for all!” Let’s call out, “Single payer health care for all!”

I clicked on one of those posts, worrying that I’d be sent to a sales person hawking an insurance company, but instead I ended up with Mitch, a friendly senior citizen himself in Florida who works for a company helps you apply for a different Medigap provider. My United Health Care monthly premium just got raised to $325. Remembering back 16 years I think the price was about $175. Mitch went through his list looking for companies that charged significantly less than $325.

My first choice was HealthSpring—formerly Cigna—whose monthly premium was in the low $200s. Mitch walked me through the company’s evaluation form, asking me about any illnesses, surgeries, and medical conditions that ran the gamut from heart disease to diabetes to cancer, none of which, other than arthritis, I answered in the affirmative. Mitch and I were pretty confident that I’d get approved quickly. He said he’d call me as soon as he heard back.

I waited a week with no response from Mitch but I did get a call from a HealthSpring person who asked me a few more questions and the one that stuck out was Sjögren’s. It’s an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks the moisture producing glands. It primarily causes dry mouth and dry eyes but can sometimes affect internal organs. I was diagnosed with secondary Sjögren’s 40 years ago: My rheumatologist used to check me out for any underlying conditions but nothing has ever manifest except the dry eyes and dry mouth, which I treat with eye drops, water, and lots of sugar free lozenges.

I decided to call the Medigap company again and this time I got Melissa, who told me that Mitch no longer worked for the company. I thought that was odd, wondering what happened to Mitch, but Melissa took over and told me that HealthSpring had denied my application. I asked why. She said they told her Sjögren’s. She’d never heard of it. I was dumb struck. The only treatment I’d ever received in 40 years was dental (dry mouth causes tooth decay), which Medicare doesn’t cover.

Melissa then put in an application for Omaha of Nebraska, which has a monthly premium in the $200s. She asked them straight out of Sjögren’s was a disqualifier. They said no, not a problem. An examiner called me right away and asked some questions, never mentioning Sjögren’s or any autoimmune disease. Again, I didn’t have any of the conditions on their list. The next day they called Melissa and said I’d been rejected. When she asked why, they said it was based on the phone evaluation. Melissa then sent an application to another provider, I think it was Aetna, and they also turned me down.

In the meantime, I got a letter from HealthSpring notifying me that I was ineligible for coverage based on my “medical history of Sjögren’s Syndrome,” which use was obtained from the rx database.

Did you know that there is an rx database, which is a consumer report, like a credit rating report, that contains all of your medical history? I certainly didn’t. HealthSpring said the consumer reporting agency didn’t make HealthSpring’s decision to reject me and told me how to obtain a copy of my rx report, which I then requested, and that I had 60 days to dispute the accuracy of the rx database. HealthSpring also told me I could appeal their decision to refuse me with a signed letter from the treating physician “ruling out any declinable conditions.”

I’ve got an appointment with my primary doc next week who I’ll ask to write the letter. He’s not the rheumatologist who I’ve seen only twice since my longtime one quit, but he knows everything there is to know about my medical history and health and will probably write the letter (he’s a good guy).

All of this has taken almost a month so my next payment of $325 will be due shortly. Is it worth going through all this bureaucratic bullshit with greedy, corrupt insurance companies to save a hundred dollars a month? I don’t know the answer to that question yet. I’ll follow through with the appeal and if I miraculously succeed in eliminating Sjorgren’s as my declinable condition, I still won’t know why the other companies denied my applications.

Remember, it was the CEO of United Health Care who got shot down on the streets of New York. Unfortunately, there’ll be another United Health Care CEO who steps right up and decides that next year $325 a month isn’t return enough for the stockholders and decides to shoot (pun unintended) for $375, or maybe $400. As our beloved Kurt Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”

The Yuppie

Listening to the yuppie’s rant about cows impelled me to write a blog in Unfucking Believable, which I haven’t visited since February of 2025, when my dog Paco died. I didn’t get into an argument with the yuppie, I just said, “I like cows,” which set him off even deeper into degradated cowdom. The answer that rose up but I repressed was, “So, you want to turn New Mexico into Colorado, do yah?

Maybe he does. He and his family moved to El Valle about five or six years ago, after spending a lot of money remodeling Jacobo and Lalo’s adobe. I will grant him a little leeway, as he missed the apex of El Valle life, when Tomás and Arsenio and Orlando were still alive and cow culture was well integrated into village life. Now, the only ones who have cows are Adam and Adrian, and neither belongs to a permittee association, so they keep their cows in the village, moving from pasture to pasture, and sometimes running wild.

But the yuppie’s main complaint is cows in the wilderness. He’s hiked most of the trails in the Pecos Wilderness, climbed its peaks, run long distance, biked hundreds of miles, and cross-country and downhill skied. He hates the cows in the watersheds, he hates them on the trails, and thinks they have more privileges than people: “It’s ridiculous that you have to fence the cow out of your field, instead of the owner fencing it in.” Part of my response to him would be, “Do you want to have to get a permit to hike in the Pecos Wilderness and then get a reservation to go to a certain area? Do you want to hike with hundreds of other hikers on the trails outside the wilderness? Do you want to drive in miles of traffic to ski Taos or Santa Fe and then pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket? Well, that’s what you do in Colorado and that’s what’s in store for New Mexico if you turn over everything to the recreationists.

Northern New Mexico has to preserve its rural funkiness or we’ll fall prey to what I just described. And cows are an important component of that funkiness. They’ve kept a land-based culture alive but, unfortunately, not so well, as demonstrated in El Valle with the loss of Tomás’s generation. We’re just on the cusp of being able to keep these lands in agricultural production, be they hay fields, orchards, organic gardens selling to the local restaurants, or grazing for horses and cows. There’s a paucity of young people to take over management of the acequias. The mayordomo in El Valle lives in Santa Fe! There’s only a couple of families in the village with young children—Tomás’s great-grandchildren—and the yuppie, with one young son who goes to day care in Santa Fe.

When the cows go so go our hay fields, our getting up at 6 am to irrigate them, our contentious acequia meetings where everyone in the village gets to vent at the commissioners or all their neighbors, our relationships with vecinos of land-based knowledge and contemporary contrariness, and our slower paced life than that of our urban based children. So I think the yuppie should move on down to Santa Fe to enjoy a cow-free life—I think there are fewer cows on that side of the Pecos Wilderness—and the fruits of that lovely, gentrified city. We may be slowly dying up here but we’d prefer to do it on our own terms.