We're Not Going Down With the SHIP

About 15 years ago, I had an oral cancer. It was about the least fun I ever had. I had to explain to my then 11-year-old daughter that she would see me sick. However, it wouldn’t be from the cancer—it would be from the treatment. It was excruciating, but of course I’m very grateful to still be here.

One of many things radiation is not very good for is your teeth. It inhibits production of saliva, and without it, your teeth just don’t want to hang around. However, if you pull them, your jawbone can become necrotic. An oral surgeon and I made a very bad decision and that happened to me.

I went to a bunch of specialists. They decided to pull a bone out of my leg and use it to replace the jawbone. It worked, but the recovery was brutal. I’ll spare you. Anyway, I can no longer go to regular oral surgeons. I have to go to this guy who is a combination dentist/ MD and pay through the nose to get a tooth removed. (Fortunately, however much I pay through it, my nose is still fine.)

And hey, everyone knows you gotta suffer if you wanna sing the blues. Why am I sharing this with you?

It’s because, while you might pay a small co-pay, I have to pay 650-700 bucks out of pocket to get a tooth removed. So I’m happy to have SHIP. Admittedly I’ve had some harsh words for their co-pay reimbursement process. (I’ll have even more in a few.)

Here’s the thing—I got a receipt from the super dentist. I waited a week, and got a hundred dollar check from CIGNA. I filled out a SHIP form, scanned the CIGNA papers (three pages, with a copy of the check), and emailed it to SHIP. This process took me five to ten minutes, tops.

I did this once before, two years ago. I expect to get a check from SHIP for five hundred dollars. This tooth removal will end up costing me 50 bucks, probably not more than the co-pay I’d give a regular oral surgeon. This is a reasonable process. Of course I’ve now met the annual cap. If I’m careful not to lose more than one tooth per calendar year, I’ll be okay.

The process to get 105 dollars back took my late friend Daniel Harkavy two hours. Daniel was making many doctor visits, to the same doctors, and he was able to use the MyChart for a single company to pull that off. If you, like me, see doctors from various health orgs, it won’t be so simple.

Reps from SHIP will tell you that the co-pay refund follows the same process as others. RTC Chapter Leader Bennett Fischer repeated that to me, and I believe it was as a comment here on something I wrote about SHIP. Bennett said he knew the folks who worked there, and they were good people.

I don’t dispute that. Also, I don’t blame them for the co-pay process. It’s not their fault they work for parasitical opportunists.

The first and only time I submitted a request to get my co-pays back, I sent bills from my doctors along with paid receipts. This was not sufficient. They needed this paper, and that paper, they needed papers from Medicare, they needed papers from GHI, and I needed to do this and that.

I’ve already invested a few hours into 2025. I gave up. It’s simply not worth my time to do this work for 105 bucks. I’m not alone in that. Unity tossed this out as a carrot to get retiree votes. They made it so convoluted and difficult that they had to hire more people at SHIP to do video conferences.

Should you need to do a video conference to do paperwork? UFT chapter leaders now have a special vehicle to speed along paperwork complaints. The fact that UFT bosses have dumped this on us is just another example of the ageism that pervades their patronage mill. We’ve, sadly, got less time than our in-service colleagues and Mulgrew wants us to spend it following his nitpicking regs.

We deserve better, and Fix Retiree Benefits, our group, will demand it. I’ll have more on that very soon.