H. M. Oh just shoot me now.

I apologize in advance to any of you who might work in the health insurance business, but right now I’d rather stick feathers on my head and share a duck blind with Dick Cheney than have to call my HMO with any more questions about my account.

And even worse, I had and I’m still dealing with a rather involved condition that spanned not just one but two different HMOs, as my company decided to change carriers (for the better, I might add, if that’s possible) in the middle of my treatment.

But I don’t just get the two HMOs, oh no. For each I get the HMO proper, plus their third provider who approves medical procedures. Plus their third provider who analyzes blood tests. Plus their third provider who “manages” my mental health needs. So for each phase of my treatment (first, up to and including October 31, 2005, and second, from November 1, 2005, inclusive, and onward) I’m dealing with four different companies. Each with their own indecipherable web site and voice mail system. Each forcing me to wind through a rat maze of options and extensions until, if I’m lucky and the stars align just the right way, I get an actual human being on the phone. And then, having already plugged in my ID number, social security number, telephone number and date of birth, this human being, with a name I can’t pronounce let alone spell, asks me to verify this information all over again.

Christ, I’m exhausted just from writing the previous paragraph.

Then we get to decipher exactly whose responsibility the “error” might be. And 99% of the time, it’s not theirs. Once I got a battery of blood tests the results of which took five weeks to reach my doctor’s desk, and that was after I called the prescribing doctor three times, the blood lab twice, and the third party provider who manages the blood tests once.

Turns out they had my name spelled wrong.

And I’m not making this up when I tell you that last summer I gave myself a stomach ache trying to get approval for a prescription for Aciphex, since absolutely no prescription anti-acid medications are on the HMO’s formulary list, and they required me to try every single over the counter preparation for my gastritis (none of which worked) before they’d deign to give me something that is advertised as frequently as Coke and should be as easy to score in any public high school.

Fortunately, after some treatment with alternative medicine, I no longer need the aciphex at all.

But this is still leaving a bad taste in my mouth.

For weeks now, I’ve been getting notices from the old HMO letting me know that payment is being refused for all kinds of doctors and treatments. All right, whatever, I thought, and stuck them at the back of my bill basket. Eventually they’ll submit again and eventually everyone will get their money, right?

Then I started getting bills from doctors. Then hospitals. After meandering through the voice mail maze to an actual person (I think his name was Brandon), I was told that they didn’t have any of these bills on file as being submitted.

All this time, all those months that the first HMO was “taking care” of me, they’ve been providing my entire medical team with the wrong billing address.

And back in the hopper they go.

I long for the days of yore, when I’d hand the doctor my Blue Cross card and never write a check for a co-payment, never see a bill, never had a worry.

Of course I was ridiculously young at the time, and all I ever needed was the yearly checkup and an occasional antibiotic for bronchitis. For them it must have been like Kate Moss walking into Sizzler.

I know there are no easy solutions, that everyone’s got their thumb on the scale (or in the pie, or up their asses, as the case may be), but jeez, how did this get so bad?

Of course we could go like Canada, and make granny wait a year for a hip replacement. I thought it amusing when I heard that agencies are sprouting up like mold around large US cities near the Canadian border, ready to provide health services for our disgruntled northern neighbors.

Or we could be like Austria and many European countries, where more than half of their paychecks disappear into taxes and you have no choices when it comes to healthcare.

I’m for the US and Canada pooling their resources. Cheaper drugs for us, shorter waits for them. Why fight it when the black market is already working so well?

I don’t know, but it sounds better than anything Congress has yet to dream up.