Medicare & me.

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: UNPLUGGED

Seems getting older is all about paperwork. It should be about preparing for personal Rapture, the lifting-off into the Great Maybe. Just when I thought I should start reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and start rounding up my personal belongings for the Ultimate Toe Tag Sale, I received my 162-page handbook, Medicare & You.

The people on the handbook's front cover all look very happy with their Medicare plans. They certainly look happier than their Cialis cohorts who have to jump into claw-foot bathtubs "when a moment spontaneously turns romantic." Side effects may vary. Turns out, the Medicare spokes-codgers look happy because they have survived enrolling in Medicare.

For many years, I had the good fortune of being on my dear partner's health care plan. When she changed jobs, we decided it was time for me to sign up for Medicare.

To humblebrag: We have a few advanced degrees between us. She is a lawyer. She has run organizations and foundations and supervised the development of their health care plans. Together, we have learned the language of financial planning and home ownership.

To learn the language of Medicare, before the looming December enrollment deadline that I had ignored (my bad), took several weekends of intensive study.

Side effects were unvarying: blinding headaches, fuzzy thinking, temporary loss of reading comprehension, difficulty sleeping, and throwing up hands. I would like to apologize to all the people I maligned who were whining about signing up for the Affordable Care Act. Now I get it.

Time will tell if I actually signed up for Plan B, the medical insurance, or Plan B, the emergency morning-after contraceptive. Or if my Plan F's additional mind-the-medigap coverage through AARP and my Plan D's prescription drug coverage through something that sounds like Silver Stream Motor Homes will do what they...