3. August, 2002 - miscellany
- Heartland AIDSRide calls it quits because the number of riders kept decreasing.
- How Gray Is My Valley / Callow youth is out, experience, maturity are in at high-tech firms in Silicon Valley. I know a couple of the folks interviewed for this story, and passed the reporter's name on to them when she initially asked me for an interview. Cool.
- Deadheads trekking to Wisconsin for concert by surviving Grateful Dead members this weekend.
- Surprise! The Italian Police planted molotov cocktails on G8 protesters last year.
- Back in April, when I hurt my knee, I went to the doctor. I thought I'd paid all the bills for the visit a month or so ago, but this month I got two more bills. One from a radiologist for reading the x-rays and second billing for x-rays (at cheaper price than I'd paid to the clinic where they were taken) from my doctor. And it got me thinking about why medicine is so expensive? My conclusion: it's because we're getting routinely screwed. The radiologist who read the x-rays did so after my doctor had already looked at them and decided how we should treat my knee. The second reading changed nothing, and I wasn't informed of the results. At best, it provided my doctor with confirmation of what he saw in the pictures. The second billing for the x-rays was a mistake and was corrected with a phone-call. But what's the cause of the problem? Regulation. There are a ton of regulations, and they're not uniformly enforced. The cost of compliance with all of these regulations makes big corporations better able to compete than individual doctors, so the doctors join a larger clinic or hospital in self-defense. And finally, large corporations with their layers of bureaucracy can double-bill or commit other crimes with a much smaller chance of paying for their misdeeds. Would it have made a difference if I'd had an insurance company on my side? I don't think so. I suspect they'd have just paid the duplicate bills and bumped my premium, rather than checking into it and discovering I was being billed twice for the same services.
- A counter-argument to people who say There oughta be a law.
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Sun, 04 Aug 2002 07:45:43.