Hell's training ground

I would like to thank my insurance company for a tremendously educational experience. Because of my spouse’s heart attack and subsequent hospital stay, I now know exactly what steps I should take should I have chest pains in the future:

1. Take two aspirins.

2. Make sure my Will is signed.

3. Find a comfortable chair.

 Under no circumstances should I go to the emergency room or seek other medical assistance, since doing so will only cause, let’s call them Green Cross, the unbearable pain of having to pay money that they have promised to pay and force them to wreak revenge by raising our premiums even higher.

If I have time before I die, I will regret that we were responsible people who bought as much health insurance as we could afford, instead of spending that money on other, more enjoyable things.  Over the years this became a monthly payment of over $900 and a $10,000 deductible even though we were both healthy, but we felt that we should have it in case anything catastrophic happened. Well, it did back in 2011, and now we know how ill thought out our decision was. We were foolish enough to believe that the cost of an item such as an ambulance ride would at least be applied to our deductible, but it and a surprising number of the other charges weren’t. For some reason known only to GC, ambulances are not necessary for heart attack victims. Additionally, in a move I can only describe as extremely tasteless, we received a pamphlet from GC a few days after the incident which cautioned against using the emergency room for non-emergency illnesses, because that would be costly (for them). Since when is a heart attack or even a potential heart attack NOT AN EMERGENCY??

Being in the insurance business must be a wonderful thing. You get to take huge amounts of money from people year after year, even when they don’t require your services, and then when they do, you can refuse to provide said services.  And it’s all legal. Mere humans have achieved what demons and other evil creatures have been trying to do for centuries. 

Just think, if Mr. Scratch had worked for an insurance company instead of Hell, even Daniel Webster couldn’t have prevented the damnation of Jabez Stone. I mean, come on, Scratch had actually kept up his end of the deal!  Mephistopheles fulfilled his part of the bargain with Dr. Faustus. In fact, all the devils, djinns, witches, magic monkey paws, etc. in literature who made bargains with human beings did what they said they would do, even if it was extremely literal and unpleasant. What a waste of their time and resources! They should have spent some time working for GC, then they would have known how to write a contract where they didn’t actually have to deliver anything and they still got the payments.

Come to think of it, there aren’t really any recent stories about people making deals with devils. Maybe Hell has sent them all for additional training with insurance companies.