Kids, Don’t Drop Out Of School 

A Public Service Announcement

From My Journal

Kids, Don’t Drop Out Of School

March 2008

     Education is a wonderful thing, and the lack of knowledge can be quite detrimental to a person’s well being. Such as what happened to this guy:  An 18-year old went into a muffler shop wearing a mask and waving a gun. He said he was there to rob the place. The employees told him they had no cash and didn’t know how to open the safe. This genius told the guys that he would leave two phone numbers that they should call when the owner got there with the combination to the safe.

The owner arrived and the employees called the number. They also called the police. The 18-year old returned, still wearing the mask and waving the gun around. The police collared this perp, after shooting him in the leg, and he is now awaiting the disposition of the Chicago judicial system. Now when this kid gets through with his course work at Graybar University he may have learned how to stick up a muffler shop with a better chance of success.

Russia Has Changed

March 2008

     Things have sure changed in Russia. Currently a shepherd is suing the government because a 10-foot long chunk of metal from a space rocket landed in his yard. Then to add insult to near injury it landed right next to his outhouse. Now every time he uses that facility he is probably thinking about where the next one is going to land. In the old days this shepherd would have been shot for not trying to cushion the impact of this expensive piece of the Motherland’s scientific equipment.

This Activity Should Be A Major In College

April 2008

     This morning, while waiting for Lorraine to awaken, I cast around for something quiet to do and hit upon the project of sorting through the medical file. This is a file of pending medical bills. It contains the EOB’s (explanation of benefits) from the luckless insurance company who inadvertently stumbled onto our business. It also contains any receipts of co-payments. Both of these categories are waiting for actual billings from medical providers, when all pieces of paperwork pertaining to a specific medical occasion can be matched up, the bill paid, and another batch of paperwork put to rest. Now with any other industry, this would be a simple function, except where lunatics were involved as either the service provider, insurer, or the recipients of the service--mainly Lorraine and me. Taking me and Lorraine out of the equation as one of the abnormal parties, and as much as I would rather not like to think of my medical providers as lacking in sound reasoning and/or highly developed mental agility, leads me to the only possible conclusion. One or both of the two major parties, providers or insurers, have to be either incompetent or lacking in the most primitive skills needed to keep track of their businesses.

Each medical provider will have the enclosed doctor’s name or names on their office door, which is usually not the name of their business. When you make your co-payment, the receipt, if it has any name on it at all, will not usually show the business name nor the name of the specific provider. When the EOB comes from the insurer it, in most cases, has the name of a provider you have never heard of. It’s like the provider has no idea of what the patient is going through to get him some money. And no thought is given on a way to make it easy for the patient/customer to deal with the system. My experience is that if the provider did recognize the problem he has no training or the skills to make him or her of any help to smooth out the system. To be fair, this plague is not necessarily unique to the medical industry.