Silicon Valley Redneck

Damn phonebots

Just had a call from a phonebot (apparently a meatbot, not the silicon type) wanting to talk at me about the new "health care reform..."

Hold it right there.

It's not reform, goddammit!

The purpose of the ACPA is to prevent reform, and to lock everyone into the crooked third-party payment system while breaking it still further.

You want health-care payment reform?  Here are some ideas:

• Require that the amount actually paid by a third-party payer, plus the amount paid by the patient, add up to the amount billed by the provider (so long as the amount billed does not exceed a published limit for the service in question).
• Start enforcing the laws against price-fixing, conspiracy in restraint of trade, and so on.  If these laws have exemptions for "insurance" companies, fix them.
• Include government-run third party payers (e.g., Medicare) in both of the above.
• Allow formation of group health plans / insurance pools for groups other than companies with full-time employees.
• In general, remove the special tax and legal status of employer-provided health plans.

Those are just a few of the obvious ones.

Alas, the Stupid Party will never promote these, as it's almost as locked to Big Finance as the Evil Party.

For those who think the Shutdown Theater is just fine...

If it's OK for President Beeblebrox to order the NPS and NFS to spend extra money to prevent public access to public lands... and to views of public lands... and to close down private businesses that lease land from the government... and generally handle lack of spending authorization in gratuitously disruptive ways...

Well, look ahead to 2019, when the Democrats in Congress won't give President Cruz the budget he wants... and he orders the Army Corps of Engineers to start blowing up dams.

Not that much of a stretch, is it?

Separation of powers: wozzat then?

So there's this proposal described over at Yahoo for avoiding debt-limit crises:

Here's how the McConnell Rule would work, according to Orstein: The president raises the debt ceiling; Congress votes a resolution of disapproval; the president vetoes that resolution, which requires a 2/3 vote to overturn and is unlikely to happen.

Excuuuuse me?

In my copy of the Constitution, the power "To borrow Money on the credit of the United States" is assigned to Congress.  Not the President, Congress.  Right there in Article I.

The President has no authority whatsoever to raise the debt ceiling, and re-assigning it to him would require amending the Constitution.

Gave the fuzzballs their flea poison this morning

Mixed with half a can of people tuna - special treat!

Thing is: as they start eating the stuff, the poison rapidly starts affecting the parasites, which promptly behave in ways that make their hosts even more uncomfortable than usual.  This conditions them to be suspicious of breakfast that smells of chicken-flavored Nitenpyram.

No, this isn't some sort of metaphor.  Why do you ask?

Hugo Pinero, call your office

According to El Reg, someone's got a Kickstarter project going for a watch that counts down the remaining seconds of the owner's life.

Wait, haven't I seen this before somewhere?  Only without the watch?

And suppose it actually worked?  Suppose someone could, accurately, predict the moment of your death, retail?

Heinlein figured the life-insurance business would get seriously bent out of shape.  Now, with the vast increase in consumer credit?  Many people would act like Terry Pratchett's wizards, who, knowing when they will die, have a penchant for running up large debts in their final days.

To qualify for credit, eventually everyone would have to have his life-line read, and file it with the credit bureaus.  Which, given the difficulty of keeping the information confidential while making use of it, opens a fascinating can of worms: what if everyone could know when anyone else would die?

Hm.  And if it shows you still have more'n a couple of years left on you, you won't be dying of a car crash or heart attack, so why carry that expensive health plan?

Update: See also today's Pearls Before Swine.

The government must really be shut down

I was in San Jose this afternoon, and my standard return route took me past a fire station, about 1600.

To paraphrase Flanders and Swann again: there was the pole, but the flag itself was missing.

That fire station does, ordinarily, fly a U. S. of A. flag out front.

It was daytime, with nary a hint of rain.

So...

Is the country out of business, and the flags have been taken down?

Have the Flag Police been making the rounds of local government buildings, demanding that the national emblem be taken down owing to lack of funding for... er... something or other?

Or was it just that one place, and maybe that particular fire station is closed?  Nah.  Gotta be a national thing.

"80% coverage"

Wait, lemme get this straight...

Under the new health-care payment regime, your health plan has to pay at least 80% of your bill in order to be considered "real insurance" - as opposed to a boring major-medical policy that pays 100% of everything over the deductible.  Is that about it?

So... if you're paying 20% of the bill... and the nominal price of health-care services, as shown on the bill, is generally about 10 times what a reasonable price would be (because the third-party payers, including the government, have been cutting themselves about a 90% discount when it comes to paying the bills)...

... then you're stuck paying twice what the services should have cost, plus the outrageous premium.

Have I got this right?

Update: here's this helpful bit from the Murky News:

The law also will often make some policies more expensive because it limits out-of-pocket expenses to $6,350 annually for an individual and $12,700 for a family.

Note that the category "out-of-pocket expenses" does not include premiums.  So, assuming my new compliant policy were to cost the same next year as my non-compliant policy does this year... my actual expenses, just for me, would be a minimum of $10,152 and a maximum of $16,502.

And: you know how "they can't cancel your coverage just because you get sick"?  Well, they can still cancel it if you don't keep up the payments, no?  And, if you're struggling to pay the premiums when you're healthy... and then you get sick, and miss a few weeks of work... guess what you won't be able to pay?

This calls for a layer of meta-insurance, which promises to pay your health-plan premiums if you get sick and miss work.  Another fine racket!

What comes after "spider"?

The great big hairy thing in the bath is back this morning.

Now it has twelve legs, and far too many eyes.  And claws.  Lots and lots of claws.

Basic structural problem, probably by design

No, I haven't tried the Obamacare exchange thingy; I got a budgetary estimate from the California web site a few months ago, when The Powers That Be were hyping the "not as expensive as feared" pricing.  If memory serves, I fed in some basic information (age, sex, maybe ZIP code) and got a number... that was close to $7000/year* for the cheapest allowed option.  Certainly I didn't create an account and feed in large amounts of personal data.

But here's the thing: it seems that now the exchanges have gone... well, "live" seems rather a strong word... anyway, now that they're supposed to be open for business, one does not simply get a quote, even a budgetary one.  It's necessary to create an account up front.  Does this include feeding in all the personal data required to apply for the subsidy?

I wonder how much of the traffic is just people like me, who know damn well that they don't qualify for any subsidies, just trying to get a handle on What It's Gonna Cost.  This should be static data, and should not require creation of a user ID.

I'm kinda waiting for Emperor to give me a hint as to next year's premium... and they've gone from "You're all set with your current coverage!  It's gonna be fine!"  (Emperor's lobbyists had a hand in writing the damn law, after all) to "The great thing about your grandfathered coverage is that you may be allowed to keep it" to "We'll offer you the option of keeping your current coverage or switching to one of our Obamacare-compliant plans," but as yet they've offered exactly zero information about what any of those options will cost.  There is the suggestion that the status quo option leaves me subject to both the Cadillac Health Plan Tax and the Uninsured Penalty.

Oh, and "probably by design"?  Hey, it's a way of getting just about everybody to hand over all their personal details to a brand-new government department that seems to be employing a lot of political operatives, and to lack even the most rudimentary information security.

 

* Based on the assumption that all the healthy youngsters who don't have full-time jobs will sign up at inflated prices to subsidize me.  Your reality may vary.

Quick, lock up all the plastics!

Southmoon has taken to stealing bits of glossy paper out of the recycle basket and shredding them.

It's like she's nesting or something.

Is she trying to become part of the Nesting Cattishness?

Product ideas lurk in the darndest places

So, after the Great Spider In The Bath Incident of Wednesday, I found myself humming "Chicken on a Raft" while shaving this morning.

And this led to the idea for a product!  No, not the tactical-sammich version of chicken on a raft.  More along the lines of a k3wl electronic toy.

No details here.  Keeping it secret for now.  Will probably prototype it over the winter, file a provisional patent application, and do a little out-of-focus-group testing before deciding whether to run with it.

Meanwhile, gotta go.  Top Hat is trampling me with her big stompy (and sharp-clawed) puppy foots, and Tinga's been screeching for a long time now 'cause I haven't turned on the teevee for her Saturday-morning cartoons.

The problem with testing against unknowns...

Much of my work time (such as it's been) the past couple of months has been spent on trying to track down and cure a timing jitter problem in a measurement device I designed, which gets installed in the client's new subassembly.

There have been other technical issues, notably an offset problem that turned out to be an artifact of the assembly process, but the jitter has been the persistent biggie.

Well!

Based on yesterday's observations, one of the other components (from another vendor) has significant QC issues... and is the source of the real jitter in the parameter my gadget is supposed to be measuring.

And here we've been trying all kinds of things to eliminate the jitter on the sensor end, when it's really just measuring the input it's given.

Explaining the monumental shutdown

At the CSM, here:

The explanation from officials is simple: Without agents able to patrol, keeping the areas open invites liability problems.

This seems to be a popular explanation for A Government's Gotta Do What A Government's Gotta Do, in many areas, and yet...

Isn't there a thing called sovereign immunity?  So, like, the government isn't liable for a damned thing unless it agrees to be liable?

Or does that only apply in cases of actual malfeasance?  You can't sue the government because a group of its employees murdered your brother, but you can sue it because it failed to prevent you tripping over a tree root?

Looking closely at bills

So here it is, another bill-paying morning; only one that actually needs mailing today, and others that can wait until next week.

On my Bank of Italy Master Charge bill, I see something new: $8.10 Foreign Transaction Fee.  WTF??? They never used to charge me for that.  Is this some new scam to make up for the fees they can't charge under the Doddering-Fink Law?

Then there's this thing from my HMO.  To avoid getting too specific, I'll refer to the general practitioner as GP, the physical therapist as PT, and the HMO as Emperor.  All clear?

OK, so: when I went to see GP for the leg thing, there was a $30 copay.  On each of the two visits to PT, there was a $55 copay.  Each time, I used a credit card.

Then I get this here bill thing, from the Emperor of Nothern California's accounting department in Alabama:

Provider	Description	Charges	Paid by Insurance	Paid by You	Amount You Owe
GP	Office visit	331.00	301.00	30.00	0.00
PT	Evaluation	245.00	112.00	55.00	78.00
PT	PT: each 15 mins, therapeutic	100.00	45.00		55.00
PT	PT: each 15 mins, therapeutic	100.00	45.00		55.00

Then there's another item that shows a $55 copay not yet processed.  So, they're billing me for $188, of which I already paid $55, and it looks like the $55 copay for the first visit was mistakenly credited to the line item for PT "evaluation," which... er... does that mean reading my medical record, or was it part of the first session?

So, lessee now.  The basic GP office visit (under 15 minutes) is billed at $331.00, or $1324/hour.  The PT sessions (basically office visits) are billed at $400/hour.

Well, there's your problem!

Emperor Third-Party Payment's captive Provider Network is billing outrageous amounts for routine services.  Since Emperor TPP and Emperor PN are part of the same corporation, it's all a matter of shuffling cash from one pocket to another (and you should see how much they charge themselves for their unionized employees' heath plan!), but...

Well, for one thing, my Cadillac-priced health plan (by always choosing the lowest-premium option when offered a choice, I've kept my premium down to a little over $10,000 for this year) apparently only has 45% coverage for physical therapy.  And if my share is $55/15 minutes, or $220/hour... just how much is PT getting paid, anyway?  Do physical therapists take home anything like $440K/year, never mind the $800K/year implied by the nominal charge?

Surely I could find a physical therapist in private practice who'd charge less than $220/hour, cash... right?

And that $1324/hour for the doctor, all but the copay covered by the plan... well.  You know how, under Obamacare, 80% of all premiums must go to paying for health care services?  Hey, look!  If Emperor PN sets its rates high enough, there's no problem showing 80% of Emperor TPP's incoming premiums being paid out to the PN for health care services.

And, under our glorious third-party payment system, the amounts billed and the amounts paid are largely unrelated, and neither has any connection to what health care ought to cost in a sane world where people were paying real bills with their own real money, and being mindful of how much they were paying, and for what.

The wonderful efficiency provided by an HMO allows all this obfuscation to happen under a single corporate umbrella, with internal billing and payment processing handled in just the same way as in the inefficient outside-the-HMO system.

Time to sign off, before someone reports me to the Mental Hygiene Police.

Inspiration!

What with the crappy economy, recent involuntary non-working time, and dead refrigerator... and a bill from Kaiser that makes me wonder just what my $10K-plus/year premium is actually supposed to cover... well, the ol' finances are kinda stretched right now.  The state of the stock market makes this a bad moment to raid my pathetic excuse for a retirement fund, too.

What to do, what to do...?

Oho!  The federal government is closed this week, right?

So, like, it's open season on banks?  Where'd I leave my balaclava*?

 

* I don't really want to wear that on my head.  My hair gets all full of honey.

In any case, I don't disguise worth anything.  Wear mirror shades, a fake beard, and totally-out-of-character clothing, change my walk, and everyone still recognizes me instantly.

I have fought a grizzly bear,

Tracked a cobra to its lair,
Killed a crocodile who dared to cross my path,
But the thing I really dread
When I've just got out of bed
Is to find that there's a spider in the bath.

Now, Flanders & Swann's spider was merely "half an inch across at least"; the one I confronted early this morning, in proverbial pajamas and bare feet, was enormous.

There it was: big and hairy, with the requisite eight legs and more than its fair share of eyes wherewith to stare back at me.

In the end, I had to divide it up and remove it a piece at a time.

Don't like that song?  OK...

Kitten in a bath on a Wednesday morning, oh what a terrible sight to see...

If only we had a government to keep us safe from such things!  Two days without a feral government, and look at what happens!

In other news...

As noted yesterday, my parents just returned from a trip.

'Twas a supposedly edumacational riverboat cruise from Chattanooga to St. Louis.

Seems it turned out to be not so much their thing (and would have been very much not my thing).  Small accommodations, glorious meals, and not much to do between meals.  So, geared more to Hobbits, apparently.

Interestingly, they didn't encounter mosquitoes.  One of the Big Warnings I get when I mention northeastern Tennessee to people is Vast Swarms of Giant Killer Mosquitoes.  (Other warnings tend to involve hillbillies and Christians.)  Having encountered North Dakota mosquito swarms (the summer after a big flood, yet), I take sightings of the Minnesota state bird somewhat seriously, and it's nice to hear that the warnings may be overblown.

Mustache discrimination?

That's the topic of this article by a military helicopter pilot.  Seems the little mustache officially sanctioned by the Army makes him look like a child molester.

Well, the regulations do have a little room for variation; it's not like the Army issues a standard mustache as part of the uniform, the way police departments do.  While a proper cavalry mustache (let alone RAF-style), or even the style sported by John Chard, may be forbidden, Erroll Flynn is still within regs, no?

I'm not sure it's exactly hipsters who've started the mustache resurgence, but then who knows where these things come from?  I've had a mustache, on and off, since high school.  The usual pattern was that, when it came time to trim the ends, they wouldn't come out quite even, and after a few iterations of trying to even them up I'd look in the mirror, pull a lock of hair down over my forehead, give a Nazi salute, and shave the rest of it off.

Somewhere around junior-ish year of college (my path through college was a bit unorthodox, so the years don't label neatly), when end-trimming time came, I decided to try curling the ends instead of trimming them... which, after a while, resulted in the style I've worn ever since* (see sidebar photo)**.

This helps me look like an Authority Figure - especially, as I learned during my stint in Corporateland, among Indians; the light-ish skin and mustache with ends curled up were apparently the trademarks of Brahmins long before the British showed up.

The last few years, this style has become suddenly fashionable, being an approximation of the iconic mustache that's now plastered all over everything, so it attracts lots of comments from youngsters.

Anyway, for those of us not subject to Army regs (which, as with so many things, seem intended to nibble away at the very concept of, in this case, mustache ownership), there's room for individuality.  Though, in some occupations, individuality itself is frowned upon; for an accountant, a distinctive mustache might be as much of a career killer as wearing a bunny moth suit to work.

 

* Back in college, and given my age at the time, I got a lot of questions along the line of "Is that real?"  I took to carrying a novelty-shop fake mustache in my pocket so I could show the questioners what a not-real one looked like.

** On special occasions, I can curl the ends down instead of up, though this utterly fails to make me look like an actual biker.  It's kind of like Michael Dukakis wearing a tank: quite unconvincing.

Insomnia

I awoke just after midnight, and haven't been able to get back to sleep.

Because, since just after midnight, we've been living in ANARCHY!  The government is shut down!  How can anyone POSSIBLY rest at night without the omnibenificent government beaming the soothing rays of SLEEP from the orbital mind control lasers????

No, wait.  That's not it.

I'm coming down with a cold is what.  Nasty sinus headache.  If I'm lying down, I need to roll over frequently to keep all the gunk from accumulating on one side and building up pressure.

And, once the rest of the world wakes up, I need to run down to the appliance-parts store (not a federal agency), see if replacing that relay turns the icebox back into a refrigerator, pick my parents up at the airport (air traffic control is supposed to be working) and return them home, and settle in with some chicken soup.  'Course, if the refrigerator fix doesn't work, I also need to go refrigerator shopping, 'cause having a working refrigerator is one of those modern niceties whereto I've really become accustomed.

Update: Stocks up on government shutdown!  As a one-time colleague observed: the stock market is always down ahead of an election, due to uncertainty; after the election, it bounces back, regardless of who won.  (Hasn't worked that way lately, but back in the day it was generally true.)

Update 2: When I went to the grocery store for ice, my dollar bills still worked.  Also, my parents' flight fell out of the sky in a controlled fashion, wheels to pavement and all that, just as if the world hadn't come to an end.