Nothing to say

Have you ever had to pay a hospital or doctor’s bill? If so, you may have been dumbfounded by how bloody much it cost. This is understandable.

Have you ever heard a worker in the healthcare field bitch about HMOs? If so, you may have been dumbfounded by how bloody cheap they are. This is also understandable.

Now, have you ever really thought about both sides of it?

Let me not get into any arguments or anything. As my friends know, I work for an HMO and I love my job. Besides that, I love the company I work for, so I clearly have no will to bit the hand that feeds me. Actually, this has nothing to do with my job. This has to do with my own personal healthcare. Me, I work for a medicare company. I’m neither disabled nor at or over the age of 65. I am insured by a commercial HMO. And I recently had surgery to remove the polyps from my nose.

Today, I had an impulse to go out to my HMO’s site to see how much they were billed for my surgery. They have this awesome function where you can see your own billing history, including the amount that your providers charged, the amount the HMO paid (at the contracted rate) and the amount of your copay. Well, MY copay in this case. For the year, it’s been 520.

My surgery was 4/6/07, with and overnight stay, and a follow-up visit on the 9th to get all the cotton packing ripped out of my nose (ow!). The HMO won’t give me a breakdown showing the billing codes or anything, but they do give me a total for each billing party. On the 6th, I paid my copay of 250 and went into surgery prep. By the time I came out, 5 different parties had performed billable procedures on me.

Bill Party    Bill Amt   Pay Amt  % Pd
Hospital      24,809.20  2,808.20  11.3
My Surgeon    21,100.00  2,508.44  11.9
Anesthesia     1,620.00  1,205.60  74.4
Pathology        775.00    199.29  25.7
Someone else      85.00     62.63  73.7
Total         48,389.20  6,784.16  14.0

Look that over for a while; absorb it.

The hospital billed nearly 25 large. My HMO paid 11.3% of that charge. Only 14% of the total bill was paid. I’m thinking about a friend who is pretty much eternally in debt due to hospital bills. I’m guessing the hospital charges people about the same amount that it charges HMOs, but the individual people are such that they lack the power to respond as an HMO would.

I mean, imagine getting a bill from the local hospital for 48,389.20, staring at it for a few moments, checking the medicare allowables for the codes you’re being billed for, and then writing out a check for 6784.16 (14% of the bill) attached to a letter saying “After reviewing your bill, I have decided that this is sufficient. I have enclosed payment in full. Thanks for doing such a great job on the surgery.”

Friends, that’s just for my surgery. My total bill for this year so far is 57,277.35 but my HMO has paid only 10,633.16, about 18.6% of the bill. Sure, not having health insurance sucks, but paying less than 20% of your bills is better than the outrageous rates that some care providers are charging. I know there are exceptional cases, but the trend is that providers receive less money than they bill, and they manage to stay in business for a great many years doing business that way, so it’s not like 18.6% is too little.

It’s just that the individual person needs a little more muscle behind them before they can contest charges this successfully.

I finally placed an order for a DSLR a couple days ago.  I’m getting the Nikon D40 kit from B&H with the 18-55mm lens and 1GB of Lexar (the description said “twin pack”, or something, so I assume it’s two 512MB cards.)  I also ordered the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 autofocus lens (made in the USA!)  Fianlly, I got a 52mm glass filter to protect the glass on the lenses.  I should have ordered two (one for each lens), but had already spent enough.  It should be arriving at Mom’s house today.  We fly out tonight, and will be arriving there late, late tonight.  Well, actually, like 3 or 4 am.

According to Digital Photography School, Digital Photo Magazine rated the 50mm f/1.8 as the best 50mm lens for portraits.  My current camera will go to f/2.8, but there’s no way to force it to that wide aperture.  So I’m really excited to play with such a fast lens.  Without going into too much detail, the f/ signifies the aperture, or how wide the hole is that light comes through.  Smaller number = wider hole.  Wider hole = more light.  That means that this lens will be better in low-light conditions, like at my sister’s rehearsal dinner and reception this weekend.

Still, the camera is way more complicated than I’m used to, so I’m going to keep my little Panasonic handy…

Stop me if you’ve seen this one before.  You click on the image.  It opens.  You have three steps.

1. Follow the rotation of the dots.  They remain pink.
2. Pay a bit of attention to the center cross.  The pink dots remain, but the rotating spot is green.  (This part didn’t work so well for me, but ran straight into 3)
3. THE COOLEST PART!  Really focus on the center cross.  The pink dots disappear as the blank spot (looks green) passes over them.  If you shift your eyes off the center, they return.  Refocus, and they check out again, one at a time.

Apparently, this didn’t work for one of my coworkers.  I have a wacky astigmatism, though, and it is still fine for me.  It’s not like those weird 3d pictures.  Just focus on the cross.

Let me know in the comments how it works for you.

Yesterday, for the first time in years, I experienced the following new smells:

• Orchid (the first flower I’ve smelled!)
• Rosemary
• Cigarette Smoke
• Bird seed
• Donuts and more generally the ambient smell of Dunkin Donuts

Bummer on that third one.

Ubuntu has a strict policy of including only free software in their distributions. Having downloaded and installed Ubuntu, nothing that wasn’t free was loaded. Things are easy to correct oneself, even to a complete novice, but the decision must be made by the user.

When I first installed the distro, as I mentioned, there was no wireless. A little bubble alert popped up to tell me that some hardware wasn’t fully supported. It told me that the driver is proprietary, and thus cannot be supported. Do you want to use it? Yes. Wireless networks found. Neat.

Firefox is the web browser they choose in Ubuntu. It’s free, so it’s installed. Flash player is proprietary, so it’s not. The first time you go to a page (homestarrunner, youtube, whatever) that has a flash animation on it, there’s an alert. Do you want to install it? Yes. It’s installed. The animation plays. Neat.

The coolest thing about Firefox is that it’s for Linux and Windows and Mac and everything.

Firefox also has something called Extensions. They’re great. Firefox extensions work in Firefox, regardless of what operating system you’re using. If you have Firefox installed, you can load extensions on it. Two of the most popular are called AdBlock and NoScript. AdBlock literally blocks ads. It tells your computer to not go to certain sites (you can create the list yourself, or subscribe to an existing list). If you choose to block the sites that host ads, you don’t see those ads. It’s super simple. NoScript blocks sites from running Javascript and other scripts. A LOT of sites won’t work with javascript blocked. You’d be surprised how many. But they also can’t install malicious software on your computer if they’re blocked. Where AdBlock allows everything by default (then you choose to block what you want), NoScript takes the opposite approach. It blocks EVERYTHING, and then you tell it what to allow (this creates what is called a ‘whitelist’) and it allows it.

Apparently, there are reports of Firefox in Ubuntu crashing like a teenager in a bumper car. That is to say frequently. Before visiting ANY sites, I installed the two aforementioned extensions in Firefox, and I haven’t had a SINGLE crash. Not one.

Conclusion: Install NoScript and AdBlock, subscribe to the adblock list for your region, and have fun.

Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 on my laptop, and nearly everything was working perfectly. That night, I was searching for a solution to the one little problem that didn’t work itself out. I found that solution in this thread: HOWTO: TI SD Card Reader

I ran the fix, rebooted the system, and tested both a 128MB and a 2GB card. Everything works perfectly.

I will be keeping up with this forum and learning how to transition from many years of Windows usage to a happy life of Linux. That process will be sporadically documented here under the Linux tag. If you find this uninteresting, feel free to skip any entries with that tag. :)

Next up, I would like to learn some more keyboard shortcuts, get acclimated to managing my images and music, and of course backing up my DVDs. For now though, it’s back to work.