Dear hive mind,
It is emerging, as my parent goes through his early and mid-80s, that there are lots of administrative things that he has never actually understood, though he assured me for years that he was able to manage his own affairs.
One of them is his medical insurance; he lives in a country where private medical insurance is standard, but seems to incurred thousands of pounds worth of expenditure for therapies that could have been reimbursed if he had thought to ask.
(It's also just possible that he did claim them but can't now remember either way).
I'll be calling his insurance company tomorrow to ask what's possible in terms of retrospective claims, but I just wanted to ask you very knowledgeable and battle-hardened bunch: has anybody else had this experience with a parent, and needed to look into retrospective claims for things like health insurance?
Any insights you could share would be greatly appreciated, even if it's just to share a rant about parents who assure you that they have things under control...
I feel guilty that I didn't push harder to coach him when he was widowed many years ago, and that I didn't set up a proper monitoring system to make sure things weren't falling through the cracks. It wasn't technically my responsibility, as he was (and is) ostensibly an adult with capacity, but there were red flags at the time, and I'm finding it hard not to feel now that I have failed him.