I apologize in advance. This rant is so long, it took 2 days to write.
When it is time to look back on my life - whether it is next week while I've cornered someone new and unsuspecting at a party, when I write my memoir, or when it is finally my time to pass - please know I see my firing from Independent Health as my villain origin story.
Oh. Sorry. I was "laid off." Whatever helps Dr. Cropp sleep better at night.
When I started at GEICO in 2017, Independent Health just so happened to be the cheaper of the 2 health insurance plans that were offered to us in the Buffalo office. Check. Done.
When my husband and I got married in 2019, he came onto my plan because whatever the price difference, it was basically a wash because I had a better plan. This didn't really have anything to do with Independent Health, since that is also who my husband had, but just that GEICO had more employees than his company, so they could negotiate a better price.
Each year, I would look at the plans announced during open enrollment season and choose Independent Health 7 times over.
Side rant here - I hate the phrase "open enrollment season" because it sounds like we are deer about to be picked off by hunters, one by one. But I guess that checks out, right? Keep health care in this country too expensive, keep everyone underinsured, and only let a few people own the companies and make the wealth, and they really are picking us off one by one. Let the cynicism flow through you today.
As I was looking for a new job to get out of GEICO, they did something I had not realized was an option. They stopped offering regional options for health insurance. Everyone in the company was being offered Cigna, and that was it. Add it to the list of reasons I wanted out.
Around that time, I noticed that someone I had previously worked with at GEICO had landed at Independent Health. I checked out their jobs, saw they had something in project management that I was qualified for, and quickly applied. I had had nothing but positive experiences with Independent Health from a customer side, and the interview went well, so I felt good about things. I also really liked my coworkers, and realized that several people from GEICO had moved to Independent Health.
As a millennial, I will never say that I would retire from there (because lol @ retirement), but I could see myself working there for a while. The project management structure was changing a bit, my department had plenty of work to do, and I thought I could learn enough to move up in a few years.
Reality actually hit pretty hard about 2 months after I started, maybe less, when Independent Health went through their first round of layoffs in several years. I don't think we lost anyone from my team directly, but my department had at least one loss and my teammates who had been their for 5+ years knew almost all the people being let go.
It reminded me of GEICO at that point. About 2 months before COVID hit, GEICO got a new CEO. I suspect he knew he was going to be doing layoffs, but all of a sudden the world was put on hold and he would have been seen like an absolute jackass for laying people off in the middle of a global pandemic. Despite that, they did a relatively small round in October 2020. People panicked - GEICO had never done layoffs before. The world was ending. The ship was sinking. The sky was falling. It took about another year before they did more layoffs... and then they were fast and furious. Several hundred to several thousand every couple of months. They were never announced, but they were always leaked on Reddit, and that only lead to the anxiety.
On the worst day of layoffs, it was probably 2000 people gone before noon. You had no idea if it was you until you got a call from your department head and HR. Once that happened, your access was revoked in less than an hour. It felt like a bloodbath. My department lost half of our staff and there was absolutely no plan on how to handle a loss like that. I immediately started job searching. This was late 2023.
Enter Independent Health. I started there in late February 2024.
So after that first round at Independent Health, I tried to reassure myself that everything was fine. They were selling a building since the staff was WFH. They were submitting price increases to the state. I reached out to my other GEICO transplants and asked how they felt about this versus GEICO. They said it seemed unusual, and that the leadership here was at least really transparent.
We knew the business wasn't doing great - they presented the numbers to the company every quarter - but they tried to be optimistic. There were other signs, though, that I should have been paying attention to. We kept not renewing contractors, and it took forever to get any new hires through. But in July 2025, I went out for surgery. I was out for about 3.5 weeks.
As it turns out, the day of my surgery, there was a town hall. Management said they were considering more layoffs, and that they would happen before the end of the summer. To their credit, my teammates and supervisors didn't tell me. They made the decision that I needed to rest and heal and not stress over something I had no control over. So I did. I rested and relaxed. I returned to work in mid-August. It was a Monday.
The next Monday afternoon, I got a message from my grand-boss that I needed to reschedule a meeting the next day because someone else in my meeting had a conflict. I thought it was weird because this was a standing meeting that was supposed to take priority over other meetings, but either way, I adjusted it. In the morning on Tuesday, I messaged the person with the supposed conflict, and was like "girl, what?" She didn't have a conflict. Well, that's weird.
About half an hour later, I got an invite to a meeting from the CEO. I couldn't see who else was in the meeting. When I messaged my grand-boss about the weird meeting and the conflict, she just said she couldn't give me more details, but that I needed to attend because it would be important for my future.
And that's when I knew.
I panicked for the next half an hour, and logged into the meeting where Dr. Cropp had crocodile tears telling us about how bad he felt about letting us go. We were a family. He took this personally. They did everything they could to not let people go. It wasn't about performance. We did nothing wrong. We shouldn't take this personally, either. He wished he didn't have to.
But here's the thing. I did take it personally. How do you not? You lose your livelihood, when you're the breadwinner. You lose the health insurance for your family when your husband owns his own small business. You lost your job while recovering from surgery, and I absolutely have no ability to start a part-time job because I can't stand for too long yet.
I had severance for a month. I had health insurance for about 2 weeks. TWO WEEKS. And then you have to make decisions. Do you go without it? Do you chance the marketplace? Do you pay an arm and a leg for COBRA? Every decision seems wrong.
We opted for the marketplace, starting in October. I made this decision in mid-October, but I was able to backdate to 10/1 because I had gone through a "major life event." Lucky me. But thank god we did, because Tony tried to cut his thumb off on Halloween, and like, shouldn't insurance be helpful?
$1000 worth of bills later, and I'm honestly not sure it was. But almost immediately, we had to make a decision about 2026 insurance. We had to make a decision while Congress was debating whether helping everyday people with subsidies was worth it, or if they should support the Clown in office on his crusade of making his friends wealthier. Well, spoiler alert, they told us to fuck off.
The only upside to any of this was that I could hold out for a job that I liked or had good benefits for us because New York State raised unemployment the second week I was eligible to collect. It was obviously still not my whole salary, but it was helpful. The only thing that sucked was some people judging me for making more on unemployment than they made while working.
Sorry, I don't know what your household looks like, but I was the breadwinner.
At least at tax time, because our salary was less than expected, we got some money back because of how much money we paid for insurance versus what we made. How generous.
But here is the cruel part of this - my insurance is still through Independent Health through the marketplace. There is a cheaper plan, but my primary care office doesn't take that plan, and they don't do self-pay. And I went from a plan when I worked with them that wasn't cheap, but I had eye, dental, and health, and a $0 deductible. And now I pay $1500/month (last year it was only $1000/month because we had subsidies) for an $8000 deductible and no eye or dental coverage.
Earlier in April, I was diagnosed with ADHD. Well, I was prescribed Adderall for suspected ADHD. I was prescribed 5mg of immediate-release tablets. This was less than $15 for 30 capsules. Pretty quickly I realized it worked, but that for workdays, I needed more. My doctor told me to take 2 every morning for a 10mg dose. I needed a refill pretty quickly. I requested 10mg for my refill.
My doctor prescribed me 10mg of extended-release capsules. I didn't realize this, but she sent over a request for a 90-day supply, or 3 months. It was $220!!! I immediately called Wegmans and was like "please give me some explanation," and it was essentially "this is a different medicine, and you have a high deductible. You still have over $7000 left to fulfill your deductible."
What. The. Fuck. It went from $0.48 per tablet to $2.44 per capsule.
What am I paying $1500/month for???
I don't have a simple way to wrap this up. I didn't end up paying that much for the medicine - I found a coupon and paid $93 for the 90 capsules, which is still crazy to double what I paid for the tablets, but way better than $220.
But I am angry. At every turn, I feel let down by Independent Health. It isn't all their fault, of course. I could have pursued more intensely the job at M&T Bank that I was up for, and I would have been making a similar salary to what I'd had. But I would have been a contractor, with shitty health insurance (albeit less shitty) and the first on the chopping block if (and when) they hit hard times. So now I'm feeling appreciated at a job with good people but a significantly lower salary while my husband still works for himself, so our options are still nothing or the ineffective marketplace.
I think not taking the M&T job was smart, even if I miss the salary. I keep seeing Meta and Oracle and every tech company let go of their people, and knowing I was in tech means I would have been the last hired and the first fired at any of these places.
So anyway, if you need me this weekend, I'll be weighing the options in front of us. Taking a HELOC to help us consolidate debt - from being out of work for 5 months, for $1500/month health insurance so Dr. Cropp can merge Independent Health with MVP, from our Clown in Chief implementing tariffs and going to war, so we can afford to get dental work done, so we can pay down the credit card bill from Juniper going to the vet. Dropping the health insurance for just me - my primary care won't work with me, but I don't really need anything from them... except refills. How does that work? I don't want to pay $750/month just for them to say "here is your permission slip for your statin."
If you are still here, blessings to you. This is the longest rant I've ever ranted. I am mad. I am frustrated. I am feeling wildly unsure. I do not know what the right answer is. I don't think I need advice or solutions. I just need... an ear to listen, and some spare cash.
Oh, good. Juniper is limping again. /s
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