Tax Season Fury

And I'm upset about my health insurance, too.

Photo by United Workers

By Tess GC

I just want to write a little note that might not help anyone per say, but might help some of us feel a little less alone when it comes to scary systems we have to navigate to exist — namely, here in the United States, the healthcare system and tax season.

Early this week, I got an email from the Poor People’s Campaign, a group I have been involved with off and on in the last few years. It was a personal message from a member named Scott Desnoyers, inviting members to a virtual film screening and vigil about Medicare for All, and for his son Danny, and all those who have died because of our corrupt healthcare system. In the email, Scott wrote: “A single payer system such as M4All and the NYHealth Act would have saved Danny's life by providing the medication that was denied to him over a late $20 payment.” I read more about Danny’s story — I won’t spell it all out here, but Danny died because he didn’t have access to medication he needed after being suddenly thrown off his health insurance. This was due to a slight income change and a missed $20 copay. In this article about what happened to Danny, Scott Desnoyers says: “I told him ‘Danny, okay, not a big deal. How much is it?’ He tells me it’s $250. That’s a big deal because we don’t have $250 lying around.” 

I think this story struck me because: 1) I’ve dealt with similar issues for the past year, existing on the income bubble between Medicaid and an Affordable Care Act plan. I’ve been bumped between the two a couple times now, and I have to pay close attention to my insurance to make sure I don’t end up with a sudden gap in coverage; and 2) I have parents who can afford to help me out in a pinch, if I needed the $250 one month. My dad had a great pension plan from his job, something most of us don’t have access to anymore, and along with careful money management, he’s doing well in retirement. Without the luck of my parents, I’d basically be in Danny’s situation.

When I’m not eligible for Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is the reason I can still get insurance…and even then, lots of people are falling through the gap that the ACA doesn’t cover. Image courtesy of https://voice.ons.org/advocacy/us-supreme-court-upholds-aca-again

Around Christmas time this winter, I learned I was getting kicked off my $50 a month Obamacare plan. I spent the period between Christmas and the New Year in tears and panic, trying to get ahold of someone who could explain what was happening to my health insurance. I felt like it was through some personal inadequacy, failing, or laziness that this was happening to me — and that really is how the health insurance industry treats us — like we’re lazy assholes if we lose coverage, can’t pay, or don’t understand what the heck is going on.

With a different health insurance company last year, I ended up getting continual notifications that I owed this street-side COVID testing company in New York like $400 for supposedly “free COVID tests” (with insurance!) — after multiple calls to my insurance, I found out that the company had submitted claims for the coverage to my insurance too late, and that’s why they weren’t covered. After submitting a request for a review, I was informed by my (now former) insurance company that since I’m no longer a customer, it’s not their problem. So I guess figuring out how to deal with the continual requests for some $400 is my job, even though the whole thing isn’t even my fault. Of course, if I had messed anything up in that process, I’d feel even worse, as though it was a moral failing of mine that I now had this problem.

2C2K Photography

And this is not just my experience with insurance — it’s the whole process of trying to navigate other systems that are convoluted, unexplained to most people, and often end up costing us money we don’t have through no fault of our own, just trying to access essential services. Trying to explain to people at an insurance company that I don’t even know what I don’t know has been one of my least favorite experiences of the past couple of years. And that’s even with parents who I can ask to help me untangle the whole thing. 

As tax season has rolled around, I’ve had that dreaded feeling again — that I don’t even know what I don’t know. Luckily, I’m in a state that allows me to use one of the IRS’s free filing services without penalty, but even so, I sat in my parents’ living room and asked my dad confusing questions that Tax Slayer didn’t explain. My dad told me how much simpler taxes are in some countries, like in Japan where the government calculates what you owe, and you get a postcard in the mail telling you how much to cut the check for. Finishing my taxes after hearing that little piece of information had me seeing red. Here in the U.S., there’s too much private money to be made in the tax industry to streamline our system like that.

Talking to my friend who also used Tax Slayer, but in a different state, I learned that Tax Slayer took $50 from his EITC for using the software from a state that for some reason doesn’t allow you to use the federal software for free. They took it out of his EITC!! The EITC, or Earned Income Tax Credit is basically money that low income people get from the government so they don’t have to pay as much in taxes, or so they get a bigger refund. Tax Slayer taking a cut of that is just classic preying on the poor. My partner was filing in a state that got to try the federal government’s new rollout of their free tax filing service — but they decided not to use it when they figured out that you had to allow a facial recognition scan in order to use the service. Maybe it’s just me, but that’s an egregious breach of privacy, and I’m hoping by the time they roll out the software for everyone that we can access it without having to allow our faces to be scanned and documented. Yet again, it is the poor and low income who face this dilemma.

I don’t mean to pile all this onto your burdens — I mean, don’t get me wrong, it does feel good to bitch about it. As I point out in the title of this piece, all of this makes me furious that we’re all spending our time navigating convoluted, expensive systems designed for profit, and not to honor life. These are systems that are designed to take advantage of our needs, and that dwindle away our lives, making their quality worse, and sometimes taking our lives from us. I just hope that talking a little about this, especially as our taxes come due, can make us feel less alone in it — and can reinvigorate our wills to support each other in our struggles and suffering. Every once in a while I think about this article that

Joshua P. Hill

wrote in January about trying to do something as simple as cancel a Verizon wifi plan, and how absolutely maddening that was. There are 60 comments on that piece, detailing similar experiences about everything from equally mundane tasks to navigating systems that have to do with life and death, like healthcare. It sucks to feel alone in this. It feels life-giving to share these stories, and fight for better for us all.

Joshua P. Hill’s article on being trapped by corporations. Note the 60 comments.

If you’re older than me and reading this (I’m in my mid-late 20s), you might be thinking “kid’s just gotta learn” or “that’s life” to some of these things I’m so mad about. And it’s true, I am way madder about this stuff than a lot of people are. There are a lot of things I’ve never been able to take sitting down, that a lot of the population just deals with, and moves on. But it’s also true that these things sting more when you’re living in a generation that has very few prospects for the kinds of life options that the American middle class of my parents, and even some older millennials had. And it’s even doubly true that these have always been the problems of the poor and low income, that people have been losing their lives, and quality of life and well-being to the profit motive of these systems for a long, long time. And as the Poor People’s Campaign says, “We won’t be silent anymore.”

So I’m thinking about Scott Desnoyers, his son Danny, and all of the suffering that these systems are causing us, people we care about, and our siblings all around. Solidarity to you all, and know that you’re not alone if you resonate with any of this.