It's rather sad that I never appreciated how good our health insurance was when we were in Durban. The whole experience was totally painless; it all ran so smoothly that it never impinged on our lives at all.

Of course, it's also true that we practically never needed to see a doctor back then. This new medicalised stage of our lives only began in March this year ... coincidentally, just as we switched to the crappy insurance.

We've finally reached our huge deductible, however, so Lifewise is starting to reimburse us for some of our expenses. And I got a hefty cheque from them yesterday. Reimbursement for part of the cost of Em's meds for the last couple of months. Good news, you'd think. Only, they've already paid us this money. Last month. Fuckwits.

I called them; they said no no, it's yours, we have no doubt about it, go cash it.

I went over their statements again and it was clear that no way is the money ours. I figured out their mistake - the first cheque they cut us, they put the meds against Bobby's name. The second one, they were correctly attributed to Emily. You'd think they might pick up on that : two family members, both receiving the same extremely expensive prescription on the same day of each month? But apparently not.

So I called them again and pointed this out, and said I'd be sending the cheque back. When they looked more carefully they agreed with my interpretation. I was very nice during the whole process, but I did ask them to put it on record that I found it ridiculous that it should take me two phone calls and half an hour to fix their mistake so that I could return their money.

I just hope they don't somehow screw up our records while they're fixing the error (the rep was mumbling anxious jargon about backing out and reprocessing and claim numbers) so that they end up not paying us the money they still do owe us. The money for October's claim, for instance.

Sheesh. I hope I did the right thing in straightening this out immediately. I did consider just putting the money in the savings account and waiting till they asked us for it, but I think that might have caused us more trouble in the long run.