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Idle essays

Awww, C’mon! Am I really that dumb?

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Seriously. How dumb DO they think we are? And more seriously: could they be right??

Late in October I dropped by my doc’s office to get a flu shot. I was there for all of 10 minutes, 8 of them spent in the waiting room.

Friday, comes a statement from my insurance company: the doctor has charged my insurer $86. The insurer is disallowing it, claiming the Her Doctorness is not in the RAN+AMN network. So now I’m expected to pay this bill.

Yup. You read that right. EIGHTY-SIX BUCKS for a $10 flu shot.

So I shot off an e-mail to her, she also being one of my coreligionists who sang in the choir with me ($86 for a flu shot: ain’t that Christian?). She replied that she was shocked and would get after the office manager. And so she did. Yesterday morning, comes this missive from that worthy:

I am very sorry for the inconvenience. We deal with hundreds of insurance plans and our front office MA should have known that we are out of network for Ran+Amn. You must understand however that your card also has BENEFITOPTIONS and BEECH STREET in large letters. We do participate in these plans and it is the ultimate responsibility of the patient to make sure hisor her primary care physician is on the plan.

Grocery store flu shots are less expensive because they are purchased in extreme bulk for the masses. They also have a greater incidence of sideeffects, Dr. Wallbanger [my doc friend’s senior partner in the practice] tells me.

In our practice, we normally do a nurse visit taking the vitals of thepatient receiving the flu shot. Insurance billing requires that we bill $40 for this procedure and insurance pays whatever they like.

Billing code 90471 is administration of the flu vaccine and the going ratefor insurance billing is $26. The rate for the vaccine itself is $20.

We administer flu shots in our practice as a service to our patients, andwhen billing insurance there are set amounts for each service provided.

As our front desk did make the error, we will write off all but $20 of the remaining balance for your flu shot.

Total price for a cash pay flu shot is $30, you already paid $10, so
remaining balance is $20.

Again I am very sorry for the inconvenience.

Okay. Are you following this?

Item 1: The head partner in this practice is actually suggesting, with a straight face, that the vaccine he’s getting is BETTER than the second-rate vaccine dispensed at Walgreen’s or Safeway, where, if I’d had the time and patience to track down a flu shot clinic event, I could have had the shot for a $10 copay.

Oh, dear Dr. Wallbanger: can you spell S-P-E-C-I-O-U-S?

You understand: he and his office manager assume I’m so stupid I will buy this story.

Item 2: We’re told the insurance company requires that the practice overbill, in the amount of $40, for a grand total of 2 minutes of a junior college graduate’s time.

And Item 3: We learn that really, we shouldn’t believe anything we’re told by the front office staff. Just because the staff says the practice is in-network doesn’t mean it is in-network. In other words: it’s the patient’s responsibility to read our minds. And BTW, try to read RAN+AMN’s corporate mind, too, since that worthy organization does not publish a list of participating providers online, at least not that three Google searches will bring up.

What’s being said here is either “we try to gouge your insurance company and if we can’t get away with it we still overcharge you but only by about half of the overcharge we try to extract from your insurer” or “we think you’re dumb as a post.” Or maybe some combination of those.

Okay, okay, I admit it: They could be right!

This afternoon I donned some garden gloves and rolled the compost bin into the alley by way of trying to salvage it after the Great Bee Fiasco. By the time I got it where I wanted to dump the contaminated compost, wisps of white vapory stuff that looked like smoke were leaking out around the lid. It kept on leaking. “Is it on fire?” I wondered. Felt the side to see if it was hot: no, not especially. So I waited a while till this phenomenon settled down.

Finally opened the lid. White airborne powdery stuff was still floating around inside.

Waited a while longer. Then rolled the thing upside down and tried to dump out the compost.

No luck. It really needed to be pulled out a fistful at a time, not a practical option with weird (stinky!!!!) white powdery stuff drifting in the air.

Went into the garage to drag out a little hand-sized pitchfork-like thing. Held my breath and tried to fork out the bin’s contents without inhaling any powdery vapor.

This did not work well, and soon I was fairly certain that if I breathed much more of the “beekeeper’s” crud, it was gunna make me good and sick. Rolled the composter over to the bulk trash pick-up place, where it will sit for the next two and a half months, providing the Trash Cop doesn’t wander up the alley before the next pick-up is scheduled. He hates that.

By the time I finished, my throat was burning and I felt dizzy. Luckily, I’m going to dinner at the home of friends, one of whom is a nurse-practitioner. A psychiatric nurse-practitioner (where was she when I was busy hiring the bee dude?), but a nurse nonetheless. Matter of fact, this is the very friend who gave me the composter as a lovely and much-valued gift, some years ago. She should be able to recognize if I start to croak over during the salad course.

The bee dude’s bill is in hand: Contrary to his listing online as such, this guy is no “beekeeper.” He works for an outfit called “Atomic Exterminating Company.” Atomic, indeed: young Dr. Strangelove nuked my bees, nuked my composter, and damn near nuked me.

Well: Dumb tax, eh?

I’m still left with the question of how we’re supposed to know when service people are lying to us! I guess that requires you to be smarter than this Ph.D. is.

Are Margaret & Helen for reals?

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Dunno about you, but I’ve developed quite a crush on Margaret and Helen, two alleged old bats with strong sentiments about moronic politicians, about the state of the economy, and about life, the universe and all that. I especially enjoyed their pre-election characterization of Sarah Palin, which was somewhat less kind and distinctly more on-target than anything that ever appeared on SNL. Apparently I’m not alone: as of this evening they’ve scored more than a million hits.

The question is…are they real? Are these really two li’l ole ladies given to tooling around on electric scooters and, incidentally, regaling the planet with their trenchant opinions on the lunatics, nincompoops, and would-be dictators who have been in charge of this country lo! these many years? And if they’re not real, well then…who’s behind the blog, anyway?

I hope they are real. They’re my kinda women, if I had the guts to be their kinda woman. But I’ll admit to harboring some doubts. After umpty-gerjillion years teaching English and editing writing from all kinds of scribblers, I’d hazard a guess that they sound more like 28-year-olds than 80-year-olds. The syntax, the vocabulary, the rhythm of the language…none of it rings of 1928.

Right up until my generation (and beyond, really), women with the kind of education and wit reflected in the blog’s writing were powerfully socialized to refrain from vulgarity. Nice girls did not use coarse language. Neither, surprisingly, did many men—certainly not in mixed company. Not until Vietnam radicalized us and the women’s liberation movement oversensitized us to the restrictions that bound us to the pedestal did women begin to use the f-word, or even the s-word or the p-word or any other of those words. It just wasn’t done. You can be sure my mother would have thought all sorts of “words” about the incumbents, but even more surely, she wouldn’t have said them. And god forfend that she should put them in writing!

That kind of training is not easily overcome.

Hilariously typical, for example, is this passage, where the conversation turns to bail-outs:

So many of you kept wanting us to talk about Sarah Palin. Sorry, but I have tuned her out. If I want to hear an ass talk I can just ask Harold to pass gas. And speaking of gas, several of you asked about the Auto Industry Bailout. At first we thought “How Boring” but then Harold showed me his credit card bill from Exxon and that got us going…

But just when you’re thinking “naahhh! The grandson’s writing it. This is the language and the humor of a 28-year-old guy of the sort who sits in front of the computer a lot,” ZAP! Up pops something unmistakably produced by a female mind of a certain age:

Life is short. You realize that even more when you are old. I have said before that in dog years I am already dead. So each morning when I wake up there is a brief moment until I realize that I still need my glasses to see the clock before realizingI must still be in this old body of mine… Then I turn and put a mirror under Harold’s nose to determine ifI still need to put on my make-up and do my hair.

Even a passage or two in the Bitch Palin post can ring of the mature voice:

I’m old enough toremember the Republican party of Barry Goldwater – when the party stood for fiscal responsibility, small government and personal freedoms. I remember whenI couldtalk withfriends about politicsand just agree to disagree. And then religious nut cases decided that if you didn’t agree with them you were immoral.So they went and elected George Bush President so he couldtake the Republican Party from being a party full of respectable people to a party filled with asses, jackasses and yes – bitches like Sarah Palin.

Goldwater himself famously used the a** word in reference to the neocons, and if he were alive today I’m sure he’d be using it and other choice expressions…dare we say it?…liberally. And I do know one woman pushing 75 who has been heard using plenty of strong language about our soon-to-be former leadership. One. A wild one, she.

Here we have two wild hares. Is that credible? What do you think? Are they real or not?

My money’s on the grandson. But my heart is with Margaret and Helen.

Bees!

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beesWhen I got home from work (and junketing all over the Valley) this afternoon, what should I discover in the backyard but a young colony of bees flitting in and out of the compost bin!

Dang! They must have only just moved in, because I tossed some leaves from the pool in there yesterday or the day before.

I love bees. But unfortunately, here in Arizona virtually all wild colonies are now Africanized, and we have had a number of incidents where humans and pets have been seriously injured after annoying some of the little ladies.

So I called a beekeeper. Explained that they’re in my organic compost bin and I really, really don’t want the compost sprayed with some evil chemical. And that’s when I started to learn a lot more about bees than I imagined I already knew.

To start with, over the phone I couldn’t explain what the compost bin looks like clearly enough that he could visualize it. He said normally a beekeeper can remove a colony if it’s still swarming, but once the bees have taken up residence inside a nest, it’s usually too late. However, he added, if they’re in something moveable that you can throw a big plastic bag over, you might get away with it. I think that describes the composter, but my description of it was pretty fuzzy.

Otherwise, he said, the preferred way to eliminate an established colony is soap and water, which should do no harm to the organic compost. Truly evil pesticides are the last resort.

Composter cum bee hive
Composter cum bee hive

I said this compost bin has a little hinged hatch you open to drop in vegetable matter, and that’s where the bees were squeezing in to their plastic “cave.” It had occurred to me that if I waited until after dark, when the bees are asleep, I could tape it shut with duct tape. In time, they’d die.

Problem is, said he, bees don’t “sleep” in quite the way we think of sleep. Bees rest. He was afraid that if there was more than one hole to tape up and if I didn’t work very fast, they’d come pouring out of there the minute they were even slightly disturbed. I allowed as to how there were four, not one, slits around the hatchway, and that it would take a few seconds to cover each. He regarded this scheme as risky.

So tomorrow he’s going to come over and see what he can do. I hope he doesn’t have to assassinate the little critters. One way or the other, it’s going to cost me $125…so, good-bye to all those pennies I’ve been pinching by way of storing up for the allegedly pending layoff. Yacan’t win for losin’, eh?

Photo of bees in cereus bloom: Mila Zinkova

* sigh II *

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Joe Bfstplk

So I don’t have much to say today, other than I’m feeling slightly suicidal. Never open a statement from your investment funds during a deprecession. In October I lost another $33,000 (from one fund alone, not counting the two 403b funds at GDU, whose proprietors spare you the month-by-month gore and send statements only quarterly). Since last December, I’ve lost at least $100,000.

All of which, I’m told, will “come back” over time. Problem is, l’il chickadees, at some point in your life you don’t have any more time. My guess is it will take about 10 years for steadily reinvested returns (whenever returns return) to regain a hundred grand—optimistically speaking. I don’t have 10 years. In 10 years, should I live that long, I’ll be ready for the nursing home.

Eeyore the Gloomy
The original Eeyore

At this point, M’hijito has taken on a larger portion of the Investment House payments, but the amount I’m left paying is STILL more than 4% of my remaining savings. I can continue to pay my portion of the mortgage only if I survive the next round of GDU layoffs, a prospect that looks more unlikely as the moments pass. If I hang onto my job, I can add another couple hundred bucks to the mortgage payments from cash flow—only because I took on a ridiculous course load (behind my boss’s back) in the spring and saved every penny—and that will bring my savings drawdown to right around 4%. But…ah, my friends and oh, my foes: It will be a God’s miracle if I’m not canned in December.

I do not know what we are going to do if (read “when”) that happens.

Yes, I do. Default. That’s what we’re going to do. Sumbich.

Who’d’ve thunk it?

R.I.P.: Al Capp, Ernest H. Shepard
Loved and missed forever
…or until the rest of us die, whichever comes first

What’s your conspiracy theory?

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Over at CBS Marketwatch (my favorite portal to the Wall Street roller-coaster ride), Paul B. Farrell has an entertaining post highlighting his theory that big business has sabatoged democracy.

It’s a little oblique to my own conspiracy theory, which is that democracy in this country evaporated a long time ago, replaced by a latter-day incarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower first called the military-industrial complex. Exactly as he warned, it has taken over the functioning of this country to such an extent that our much-vaunted “freedoms” have effectively disappeared. The citizenry has been too busy sucking on the pacifier of material plenty to have noticed that little factoid.

I have even gone so far as to theorize (hang onto your black helicopter helmets) that huge pan-corporate interests (which we see manifest in the puppeteers behind the Bush administration) are responsible for the dumbing-down of public education in this country. Universal education in Western government-run schools has never existed to train brilliant minds; from its outset in 19th-century Prussia, its purpose was to develop compliance. Schools exist to teach kids to do as they’re told, so that as adults they will cooperate quietly with what the government wants them to do. It’s an effective device to create a nation of sheep.

The way to make sheep out of American citizens is to see to it that they know nothing about the history and ideas that brought their nation into being, and by design to avoid teaching them how to think logically or coherently: hence the erasure of history and literature in grade school, of civics courses in high school, and of Western civilization courses in college. Indeed, it was Eisenhower who warned,

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dumb down the citizenry and you get your way. There’s a reason college juniors and seniors will tell you Wisconsin is a Rocky Mountain state and World War II happened in the 19th century. This is not something that happened by accident. It happened because over the past forty years public schools have systematically been commandeered to teach compliance, not to furnish young minds with facts and thought.

Over time, functions that once were performed by the government have been taken over by private entities which, because they are nongovernmental, do not have to abide by regulations designed to protect your privacy and your civil rights. Consider:

• Federal law forbids the use of the Social Security number as an ID number. But try to get a credit card, a home loan, or medical care without forking it over for use as exactly that. Even if you refuse to reveal your Social Security number, insurance and financial companies already have it, and they use it as an ID number in national databases designed to track your behavior. How can they get away with it? Because the law applies only to government bureaucrats…not to corporate bureaucrats.

• Big Brother watches you in every store, every parking lot, almost every intersection in this country. Every purchase you make is tracked on store “club cards,” on credit cards, on debit cards. Every step you take is recorded on cameras. Who is Big Brother? He ain’t Uncle Sam. He’s corporate America.

• By law, the government is not allowed to violate your privacy and to track your every movement in this way. Government agents have to get a court’s permission to do this sort of thing. But corporate interests do not.

• You can write to your Congressman about an issue and be damned. If you don’t have enough money to purchase representation, the only way your wishes will be considered is if they happen to coincide with those of the lobbyists who do own your elected representatives. Who can afford to buy representation in this country? Only very large, allied corporate interests.

• Prisons, schools, medical care, and most social welfare programs are now the province of industry, not your elected government.

• Every time you pass through an airport, enter a public building, or go through the electronic examiner at the door of a retail store, you are searched without due cause.This is a violation of the United States Constitution, a fact ignored because the illegal searches are conducted by private entities, not by government agents. You accept it because you have been trained to comply and because you have been told that you should be scared, very scared.

• The reason we no longer have the basic access to decent medical care that Americans enjoyed thirty or forty years ago is that corporate interests took over that access, bringing us “managed medical care” that places an army of corporate bureaucrats between you and your doctor. These same interests have fought a one-payer medical system—expensively and efficiently—for decades. They have played a major role in running up the cost of medical care and have seen to it that most Americans are discouraged from seeking good, consistent care…what propagandists call “Cadillac healthcare.”

Habeas corpus? Oh, that… If we don’t like you, you’re not eligible for it.

So it goes. Or, we might say, so it went…

And you…what’s your conspiracy theory? Is the truth out there? Is George Busha robot? A stuffed puppet? Is Barack Obama a Muslim terrorist? Are black helicopters operated by aliens? Is truth beauty? Beauty truth? Is code poetry? Who made us think so?