I asked the insurance representative to read the second dependent’s name and date of birth again. She was born in 2009, the exact year of the pregnancy in my medical file. I told him I had no children born that year and that my hysterectomy had been documented everywhere. He put me on hold, then came back and said the dependent had been added to my plan in 2007 by my husband’s employer. I asked who had submitted the paperwork. He said the enrollment form was signed by my husband. I stared at the phone because my husband had always told me he never handled our insurance. Then the representative said something worse: the dependent had been removed in 2011, but the medical claims continued under my member number.
I drove to the hospital in Norman and asked for the original records from 2009. The woman at the records desk found the delivery admission, the ultrasound, and the discharge papers, but the patient’s signature on every page wasn’t mine. The address was the same strange address from the insurance intake form. I asked whether anyone had used my insurance card in person. She said the hospital had scanned the card at every visit. Then she pulled up the photograph attached to the account. It wasn’t me. It was a woman who looked enough like me that I understood how someone could have gotten away with it for years. I asked who had brought her to the hospital. The clerk checked the emergency contact. It was my husband.
I went home and opened the old insurance folder I’d kept since my hysterectomy. There was a photocopy of my card missing from the stack, and behind it was a handwritten note in my husband’s handwriting: “Don’t let her use the old name after 2011.” I called the insurer again and asked whether the dependent had ever been covered anywhere else. The representative said yes — under another policy belonging to the same man who had accompanied her to the hospital in 2009. My husband’s name. Then I asked whether there was a beneficiary or emergency contact on the dependent’s file. He said there was one, and it had never been updated. I asked him to read it. He did. It was my husband’s first name, followed by a relationship field that said “father.”
