My IPhone has gone from moderately slow and useful to almost totally useless-all of a sudden, it refuses to give me any data over the Edge network. No Twitter, no email, no nothing-unless I am in range of a Wi-Fi signal. I don’t know why this occurred-it was functioning just fine one day, and utterly not the next day. So I may be phone shopping soon, because an IPhone without connectivity is basically a big flat rectangle, and if I can’t connect outside of WiFi, I’m not sure how much use it is to me.
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My colleague’s elementary school age son, upon watching his Dad taking down the Christmas tree: “Is this the epilogue of Christmas? Do we roll credits now?”
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Witnessing the chaos created and utter incompetence displayed by our friends in the health insurance industry during the beginning of the plan year period, the notion that the government could possibly do worse than this bunch of clowns is positively laughable.
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On the baseball front, the Red Sox appear close to a deal for Seattle's Adrien Beltre, who will enter into a very crowded bottom half of the infield, Boston having approximately 711 players to play catcher, first base, and third base. But they'll figure it out.
Every year around this time, I start getting charged up for baseball season-the fantasy preview magazines start to show up, and I start rereading my baseball books. I have already polished off "The Neyer/James Guide To Pitchers", and I'm starting in on "Baseball Dynasties" next. About 45 more days until pitchers and catchers report, everybody!
Try rebooting your iPhone, man. Happens to me occasionally as well.
ReplyDeleteYes hard reboot of the iphone is necessary. mine craps out often.
ReplyDelete"the notion that the government could possibly do worse than this bunch of clowns is positively laughable."
ReplyDeleteVery easy to imagine, especially with the government promises to make things a lot worse.
And make sure you're running the latest iPhone software. They had a problem with 3.1.something where it would stop connecting to the AT&T network.... fixed with 3.1.2.
ReplyDelete(I think I have the version numbers right)
Thanks, folks. I think it was really the threatening manner in which I went phone shopping today that managed to scare it back into good behavior. After browsing through the Sprint and Verizon stores (and also rebooting), everything is back to normal.
ReplyDeleteAnd DM-
ReplyDeleteYou can't get worse than zero.
These free market health insurance companies, this free market that with all its healthy competition and perfect virtue, these health insurance companies don't give a good goddamn about their customers. They don't. I talk to them-all of them-for more than half of my workday, and I'm telling you they don't care. They don't care because they don't have to, because no one forces them to, because there is no scorecard-NONE-other than the profit and loss statement. They lie to their customers, and they turn themselves inside out to deny claims, and they steal people's money-they TAKE their money and then REFUSE to provide the services that their customers have paid for, and they don't care. They don't care, and they don't have to care, and no one makes them care. And we, as a country, are perfectly happy to allow this to happen, because free markets are better.
Bullshit.
"You can't get worse than zero."
ReplyDeleteIt's not binary, really. How about some examples? Such as the requirement that medical equipment companies increase to increase their prices?
"They don't care because they don't have to, because no one forces them to, because there is no scorecard"
And that is because a web of regulations and sweetheart deals with state governments insulate most of them from competition. Sweep this away, and they could compete.
Regardless, your summary applies to government-run healthcare. And if we had the nightmare solution, single payer, it would be the worst possible situation. No competition of any kind, no accountability.
"and they steal people's money-they TAKE their money and then REFUSE to provide the services that their customers have paid for"
Sounds like government, with greedy overtaxation, and then they pay government workers millionaire salaries while cutting mandated services.
"free markets are better."
Well, that is quite true. We don't have it with healthcare. We would have it if we got rid of the regulations and all 1,200 healthcare companies in the US had to compete with each other.