Well, there you are: another year nearly done and dusted...whether we like it or not. And don't they all get fraught towards the end?
Medically, I had a bad year with (since July) a cracked rib, two doses of bronchial pneumonia and lastly, a hip so sore, I could no longer climb stairs.
That's a bit debilitating since we live in a double storey home. I considered moving my bedroom downstairs, but that wouldn't help; the loo and bathroom are upstairs! I eventually saw the GP, supposing that a hip operation could be the next step, but it seems that this is all a back problem of old and the nerves leaving my lumbar vertebrae are being squeezed.
But that's not all being squeezed!
This is the time of year when I invariably take issue with my medical aid. How Discovery can go into a new year, each year, printing a self-payment gap on its statement, concerns me. It expects me to fall short and feels justified in saying so. That means, to me, that it plans upfront, not to cover me completely.
Is that bad planning or Discovery's idea of good marketing? It pips me off no end!
That self-payment gap becomes the bane of my every year-end. And this year, after a few days in hospital, it's been rinse and repeat as usual.
What really raised my ire was receiving an e-mail from Discovery asking me to complete a survey about the hospital I was admitted to.
The San, St Augustine's (or 'Saint Or-gus-teen's as many Durban residents call it) must be the best hospital in Durban, where several other private facilities are also excellent. Every staff member was an utter pleasure.
Diabetic for the last five years (as was my dad and a cousin and is my sister), I no longer check my sugar levels regularly, which can be considered dangerous. This is because I find the regular pricking of my fingertips, which are excessively sensitive, unbearable.
My fingers scream with pain and so I decided to stop.
So once admitted, I thought I should do some fairly intensive checks while I didn't have to spend hours banging away on a keyboard each day. Those 'San' nurses checked my sugar levels up to eight times daily without a single grumble. I had only to ask and they were there.
I learnt a lot. For those who understand such stuff: my sugar levels were between 4.8 and 7.1 the entire time and the highest figures were recorded on morning waking. This suggests that my sugar drops during the night and my liver, the organ which stores glycogen in the body, pumps out more, essentially to stop me becoming comatose.
Once glycogen streams into my blood of course, my blood cells obviously reject it.
For me it was good to learn that eating larger meals than I usually do, and getting no exercise, hardly affected my sugar levels at all. Especially since a public service strike this winter severely hampered my usual daily swimming routine alongside being repeatedly ill.
Forgive me, Discovery, but that's my evaluation of the San. Brilliant! You, far from!
I didn't fill in the survey because the monkey on Google was totally comatose that day! The link wouldn't work.
However, here's a thought: how about giving me the chance to fill in a survey about Discovery and its service? You wouldn't be happy with what I'd say. I kept getting messages while in hospital, telling me you were refusing to pay for this, that, or something else.
It's such a pity my blood pressure refused point blank to rise to the occasions!
Discovery's call centre is as bad as Telkom's and each year you squeeze your members just a little more. You watch the trends and then refuse to honour those responsibilities.
For my money, I believe you are ripping your members off. And I'll remember that when you next brag about your profits. Your shareholders may think you've got the goods, but if a move on my part wouldn't load the fee (and it would) I'd choose another medical aid today and be off like a shot.
If I had to rate Discovery, it would fall about as low as Eskom on my radar. And that's really underfoot!
And isn't Eskom just another big squeeze? Or perhaps I should blame the municipality. A fifteen-hour power outage in our area last week, just as the COP17 folk hit town. Do you think that those do-gooders behave as well in hotels as they claim to at home, where they have to pay their own bills?
I have my doubts...
And then there is SARS, everybody's biggest squeeze at this time of the year. It took exactly nine days for SARS to demand a full audit, putting the squeeze on me for the second year running. I doubt anyone even read the submission before the demand raced back to me.
Audits are not foreign territory for me. In the 90s I was audited practically every year, but the brains then at SARS would do it far more cleverly. Each year, a different claim was investigated. Since I couldn't know which in advance, I was kept honest (if I needed to be) for all claims.
Submitting 12 pages by hand was a matter of an hour's work including, in those days, the trip there and back. My how things have changed.
Luckily, my e-filing only went in while I was in hospital this month and I still remembered most of what I did and where to find the detail. After the chaos of trying to put it all together last year, I have changed my strategy. Before next year, I will change it more.
And submit all the detail right from the start!
So that all I need to do is scan in the documentation when SARS calls. Right now, I've already sent the audit off with an extremely sexy-looking spreadsheet and about 45 scans; after three days fluffing up the original return for a bunch of half-wits who probably don't know a debit from a credit.
My point, of course, is that no-one is paying me for all the extra work or allowing me to earn enough to pay an accountant to do it all for me. I dread seeing the way my careful, neat filing is reduced to various indiscriminate, tacked-together pages (in order to reduce the scans from 90 to 45).
And then, I suppose, I'm expected to separate and re-file again. But if last year is any indication of the time it takes SARS to check my audit (one year); it seems that moving on is not the best move I could make!
The thing about SARS, I've decided, is that it goes into a fat, childish sulk if an audit doesn't present it with a nice new pile of cash for various state departments to squander. And with bad grace, SARS admitted that last year I could have claimed more first time around...
...yet failed to offer me a refund to back up its calculations.
So, just to be pedantic, I've told it to 'Get onto it'.
Of course, that could take another year!
E-filing in its broadest sense is not a sensible course for one-man/-woman businesses/freelancers. It asks too little, needs official documentation to keep it simple and then throws all its toys out of the cot when it doesn't receive any official documentation.
Much about working alone, in fact, is unofficial. Many hours of work are not chargeable. And how sad that I cannot charge SARS for wasting another week of my time! I think it would be best if one of them came to do the damn audit himself; got to grips with my filing system and actually learnt my debits from my credits.
It definitely irks me that those trite little SARS officials get a regular salary for not using their brains; for not using what bookkeeping experience they brought to their positions; for, in short, doing sweet Fanny Adams except pass out imperious instructions.
Whatever is FICA for if not to do the checks the Receiver feels are necessary? SARS does, after all, have direct access to all our bank accounts, so why wouldn't it go with the flow?
Because SARS, like Discovery, is a master of the big squeeze.
Studio M's bottom line: The big squeeze doesn't stop there...we all know how difficult the state makes it for small businesses to survive in this country and we all experience difficulties on various levels, but please do keep your eye on the state's actions in other spheres. The POIB apart, there are changes going on in the judiciary and in local government that could make it really difficult for the small man to function properly. Freelancers also find themselves so ring-fenced that they are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Earn, that is.
Have a good summer; may God be with you.
