Syndicated columnist Marc Munroe Dion: On reaching Medicare age

Having snuck past the tequila of my 20s, defeated the heart-cracking stress of my reporter days, and still peering out from under a lifetime mountain of pipe tobacco, I am less than a month from turning 65.

This is unimportant. The head-to-toe black-and-white nuns at St. Jacques School long ago assured me that my life was unimportant. Death is the big bet, and we're all just praying our way to something beyond the coffin.

No. What's important in my failing to succumb to stress and the tequila-salt-lemon ritual is that I'm now eligible for Medicare.

If you're still young, the word "Medicare" smells like the inside of your grandmother's purse, and you don't like that smell, so you listen to music instead, or you smell the perfume on some girl's neck.

Beautiful stuff.

But.

Someday, if you do not step in front of a city bus, if you are not gunned down in a school shooting, if Putin doesn't flip the switch and make the sun fall, you will be looking Medicare straight in the eye.

I got the card in the mail. I discovered Medicare has different "parts" offering different levels of service for different amounts of money. The Medicare people sent me a Bible-sized guide.

I have a master's degree in English Literature. I've made my living as a professional writer for nearly 40 years. I read real well. Still, one thing I learned in 40 years as a reporter is if you don't know for sure, don't guess. It's better to find someone who knows and make them cough up the answer.

In Massachusetts, counties provide a variety of services to the elderly. If you're trying to figure out Medicare, that service is a counselor who's heard all the questions before and guides you to the coverage you need and can afford. My counselor was an older gent who is on the board of directors at a local bank. He's a volunteer.

If it wasn't for that agency, what are the odds that I would find a banker to explain the financial complexities of Medicare?

That was the first bit of good news. The second was that, at the end of it all, after we'd leaned my needs against my ability to pay, full Medicare coverage will cost me less than half of what I used to pay at work for a health plan that was noticeably worse.

The bad news is that I got hoodwinked in health insurance my whole working life, when money was hoovered out of my paycheck to pay for plans I had too much sense to try to use.

And before you drench me in, "It's because Medicare is a commie government program and you don't pay nothing," consider that Medicare does cost me something, and that all of the Medicare supplemental insurance I'm going to buy is offered by private companies. In fact, it's offered by one of the same companies that used to sell my employer worse insurance at higher prices.

Good, affordable insurance is finally being offered to me, but only after 40 years of getting the cheapest yet still brutally expensive plan my employer could find.

So, if you just got off shift at your minimum-wage, no-benefits job, know that you're going to get old, and you're going to get sick, but there's a good chance you'll be able to afford the cost of dying. Right now, if you fell off a ladder after the company asked you to put a large American flag on the front of their "patriotic" dollar store, you'd probably end up owing the hospital a couple grand.

Once Medicare hits, you can break a leg for a couple HUNDRED bucks. Heck, you can afford to break both of 'em. I know I can.

Until then, try not to put up too many giant American flags. You can't afford it.

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