Sprout has been in need of a couple of new providers: physical therapy, and regular therapy. You’d think I’d be able to just pick up the phone and make a couple of calls and we’d be all set. But no, foster parent life ain’t that simple.
The problems start with Sprout’s insurance. It’s Medicaid and that alone makes things hard. There are very few providers who take Medicaid because I understand that it pays poorly and creates massive paperwork headaches. But Sprout has a special type of Medicaid apparently, as I’ve recently found out, that even fewer places accept.
We’ve tried 3 places for PT, including one that advertises it “accepts all insurance and Medicaid.” So we made an appointment there and figured we were all set. But then we got a call back from them, close to the date we’d been waiting for, to tell us they don’t, in fact, take Sprout’s insurance. False advertising, what?
I was so annoyed. I started making calls and searching the internet to find a new place that would take her insurance. PT is critical for her right now because we are trying to avoid having to subject her to another surgery. All told it took a total of 10 phone calls and several hours of my time and Seth’s time to find a place that could provide the desperately needed PT.
You might ask, doesn’t the school provide PT for her? Why yes, yes it does. Crappy group PT with a provider who is in way over her head with Sprout’s complicated issues. This new physical therapist will be in addition to the one that works with Sprout at her school.
If you think PT was challenging to find, hoooo boy, let’s talk about therapy.
Sprout has had therapy off and on and really needs it to help her learn to manage her big feelings about loss and missing people, as well as some newer big feelings about her short stature.
I know there’s a desperate shortage of mental health providers. I know it intellectually but wasn’t prepared for what it would actually take to find one.
It took:
- 17 phone calls
- 10 emails
- And 1 bout of frustrated tears with a provider’s broken phone system and another provider’s rude clueless answering person.
The process almost broke me. I can almost laugh about it now, but my god. How do people who desperately need therapy for deeply troubled kids survive? My understanding is inpatient services are impossible to get, so people have been known to literally abandon their mentally ill children at the children’s hospital. And what if Sprout were in crisis? An intake session more than a month away would hardly help her. It’s a debacle that desperately needs fixing.
We finally have a therapy intake session set up for July. The provider sounds good. I’m praying she’s a good match for Sprout because we are out of other options.
You might ask, why doesn’t the case worker do this work for us? Because she’s buried alive in cases and tasks that no one else can do. She doesn’t have an entire day of her life to set aside for this nonsense. She has enough critical tasks that need to be done and doesn’t need to spend hours of time calling a broken phone system trying every permutation of key strokes conceivable to get a human.
All’s well that ends well I guess. We haven’t seen these providers yet so don’t know if they’re good but yeesh. After that ridiculousness I sure hope they are!
The icing on this cake is that the County wants to cut the rate of pay we get for Sprout. She’s getting a special rate now because of her complex medical issues but now they’re saying she’s “normal” enough to get the regular rate of pay which is about half of what we are getting.
Sprout has so many medical appointments that I could not work even if I were healthy. She’s had 4 medical appointments this month with specialists, plus the day-worth of calls and e-mails I spent getting her set up with yet MORE providers. I could happily pull out all my hair in frustration and anger if I think about it too much. We will be fighting it. Wish us luck.
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