Happy Tuesday, folks.

This week I did something I swore I'd never do: I invited another Boomer on the show. Turns out we agree on everything, which is either deeply reassuring or a sign we're both wrong.

Either way, Diana Walters drove up from Ava, Illinois (Okay, it was a Zoom, but it sounded cool to have guests drive all the way down here to be on my super important Podcast), and what she told me about Medicare will make you want to go check your mail. Possibly also your blood pressure.

It’s showtime!

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There was a time, and I realize saying "there was a time" is the most Boomer sentence in the English language but bear with me, when you could send an invoice and reasonably expect to get paid.

Not fast. Government-fast, which is its own special category of slow. But eventually, that check somehow showed up.

Diana built a counseling practice on that assumption. Saw patients. Filed claims. Did everything right. And Medicare — which had been hacked, quietly, without so much as a postcard — sent her denials instead of payments. She rebuilt her billing from scratch thinking it was her mistake. Got denied again. Then found out the system had been compromised, that hackers had gotten in and rerouted money, and that nobody at Medicare had thought to mention this to the people whose money was being rerouted.

Back in our day, if the phone company screwed up your bill, you at least got a bureaucratic, cover-our-rear-end letter typed in a bland corporate font nobody chose on purpose... but a letter nonetheless. Now apparently we've moved past that.

I check my bank account twice a day. Morning and evening. It's become a ritual, like coffee except more stressful and with worse taste. That's not how it should be. But here we are.

Diana Walters is a psychotherapist, a fellow Boomer, and a woman who got ripped off by Medicare — twice. Once as a provider who never got paid, and another as a patient who didn't know someone in Florida was spending her benefits.

We talk fraud and scams that eventually shut down her practice, and why your EOB is more important than you think.

I'll be honest with you. I knew Medicare had problems. Everybody knows Medicare has problems. It's one of those things, like the DMV or airline food, where the complaints are so constant they've become background noise.

What I did not know — what genuinely stopped me mid-conversation — is that when Medicare got hacked, they just... didn't tell anybody. Not the providers. Not the patients. Not the people who were about to get billed for $6,000 worth of catheters they never ordered (one person, Diana pointed out, does not use six thousand dollars worth of catheters — the computers should have caught that, and they didn't). For the record: nearly a million beneficiaries were affected. A MILLION. And still — nothing in the mail.

Well. I'll be damned.

Here's the part that stuck with me most: Diana said boomers are "so trustworthy — we can't imagine somebody would do something like this." She meant it as a warning. We grew up in a world where the systems mostly held, where institutions were at least performing reliability even when they weren't delivering it. That instinct — that default trust — is exactly what makes us the target.

Check your EOBs. Your Explanation of Benefits. Every one. If something went somewhere you didn't go, call. Make them open a case. Be a nuisance. Diana emailed the FBI. That's not nothing. And if you want a plain-English breakdown of what medical identity theft actually looks like and what to do about it, the Senior Medicare Patrol has a good one.

The word needs to get out. We're helping get it there.