[ale] Incompetent corporate web sites (was: Ubuntu Linux ROCKS!)

[tom]

On Thu, 22 Oct 2009, wylde bill wrote:

> I agree with just about all of the sentiments expressed there (including
> the pissing on old Ronnie's grave- he talked the talk but didn't walk
> the walk).  There are some things I'd like to critique later, but I just
> don't have the energy at the moment.
>
> Good rant, though.  :-)
>
>
> On Thu, 2009-10-22 at 13:47 -0400, Jim Kinney wrote:
>> I think that anything we (the country at large) decide _we_will_do_,
>> we do very, very well. We have the undeniable best military that
>> wealthy people pay for and not wealthy people work in and we all get
>> the benefit of that "protective service". Granted, there are financial
>> missteps here and there ($700 hammers, $20,000 coffee pots, etc) but
>> the people that are currently pissing and moaning about the exorbitant
>> cost associated with having the gubment design a health care funding
>> process don't really seem to give a rats ass about outrageous costs we
>> currently fork over to be able to kill every living thing on the
>> planet 12 times over. Do I detect a priority problem here? Or is it
>> just fiscally prudent to shoot first and feed later.
<<snip>>

Actually, a couple of pretty good rants in this thread, or at least that 
is the way I read them. But they don't seem to cover things completely.

I get to pay cash for my care, as I'm considered (or was the last time I 
looked for insurance) "uninsurable". What this meant the last time I saw 
my doctor was that I got something like a 25% discount for writing a good 
check at the time of service. I somehow don't think that is the cost of 
servicing payment plans for less solvent individuals, and I'd love to know 
why the practice thinks that is a good price point to discount to. Is that 
the adminstrative overhead cost of chasing payments out of the insurance 
companies?? That amounts to trivial data point #1

I have also become aware at some point that the medical market does not 
act in a "rational" manner. That is, among other things, greater supply 
does not act to depress prices, but to _increase_ them. (Not entirely 
unlike the legal field, although the mechanisms are different) My first 
child set her mother and I back just about $2, after I got a 40% discount 
for working at the hospital where she was born, and after some of 
the bills didn't make it to the billing office. Two years later, her 
brother was born, we got full price billing, and the cost came to some 
$1600. The difference was being in a medical center community the first 
time, and being out at the fringes of service the second. Trivial data 
point #2.

Trivial point #3, and I'll shut up for the moment. Back in the Regan 
administration, the state of Oregon was sued for not paying for cancer 
treatment for a Medicaid early enough to be successful. As part of the 
settlement, the state attemted to take part of their Medicaid budget and 
prioritize their spending according to the likelyhood of a positive 
outcome - that is paying for things that work first, and letting the less 
successful things wait in line. This plan was shot down by social 
conservatives who claimed it was putting a price on people's lives (as 
compared to letting them die because there was no money left in the 
budget?) and industry forces for reasons I don't recall.

Point is, we have a resource intensive system which is entrenched and 
willing to protect the profits of it's owners and wages of its employees. 
What happens to the patient is largely a non-issue to the powers that be.

Sort of like consultants who push MS based solutions since the consultant 
_knows_ that the solution will require more support hours billing.