One Hundred Twenty Nine: Health Care

Last night I listened to some of the oral argument at SCOTUS while drifting off to sleep. From the questions posed by several of the justices it seems as though the chances of reversing any or all of the current law are slim. Especially given the two woman (Sotomayor and Kagan) picked by BO to serve on the Court, the chances of overturning ANY law passed by a Democrat congress are almost nonexistent. So, to me the focus should not be on undoing what BO has done, but rather on how to fix it. If we are to have national health care, which is not philosophically a bad thing, what is the best and most efficient way to implement and administer it? If all the members of congress got sick and went to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, I guarantee that there would be quick agreement on a plan to simply hire the people at Mayo to run the national system and be done with it.

As far as the economics are concerned: I currently pay about $13K per employee in health insurance (this covers the employee and their families). I assume my rates are about the same for most small businesses; large corporation pay far less because of economies of scale. But we use VERY simply economic assumptions, say the government taxed every individual taxpayer an average of $3K per year for health insurance. With approximately 100 million taxpayers, that would be about $300 billion per year generated to pay our collective health care costs. If that is not enough, tax a little more. The point is, there would seem to be enough wealth generated by our current economic activity to accomplish the objective.

One Hundred Twenty Eight: Apple

So, here I sit at the Apple Store in Deer Park, Illinois. The store probably has 75 people milling around. Approximately 30 of them are blue-shirted A drones. One A drone in particular, a 50-ish woman trying desperately to look something less, hovers over me like humming bird. My friend is buying, or has purchased an iMac and is being led through the set up process by an overweight A drone who seems to be one of the less obnoxious employees. Actually, they are all quite impressive in terms of superficial product knowledge. Interpersonal skills are generally non-existent though. I guess Apple, and the tech biz in general, has long since decided that basic personal social skills are not important. And I suppose when you are interacting with someone electronically, the other person really doesn't care what I sound, look or smell like. It's a different world out there from the one I grew up in, which is of course the lament of every generation. But I wonder if this shift from real to virtual contact between humans really is a game changer.

One Hundred Twenty Six: AT&T, Tmobile

So ATT has failed in its attempted acquisition of TMO. The timing of all this was good for me. Last summer I migrated from ATT to TMO. The merger had nothing to do with my decision. Rather, the ATT cell coverage for calls was so bad in my area I would literally have 2 or 3 dropped calls per day. ATT eventually agreed to waive early termination fees as well as a few hundred dollars of past due monthly bills, which I had strategically stopped paying.

Now I see that ATT will be paying TMO $4 bilion. Boy, am I glad I'm not an ATT customer now. I'd be really pissed off if I knew I was paying part of that break up fee.

One Hundred Twenty Five: Charitable Solicitations

Few things irk me more than private, for-profit businesses that solicit my business or lecture me about charitable giving. "Buy a five dollar bottle of water and we'll give ten cents to starving children!" It is probably some moronic Harvard MBA who comes up with this baloney. Only this morning I received an email from my bank haranguing me to give them money, food, and clothing so the bank can distribute it to the "needy."

All these companies are making excellent returns on my business. Let them give away their own money. How are these companies able to be a better arbiter than I of who should get my donations?

These not-so-thinly-veiled self-serving scams only reinforce my long held position on charitable giving: I never give any money to anybody who asks me for it. Don't ask, and you've got a shot.

One Hundred Twenty Four: Bad People

What do Bill Clinton, Tiger Woods, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jon Corzine all have in common? They have all been celebrated public figures in positions of authority and power, and generally esteemed by large sections of the public media before being exposed as scoundrels and louts. The other thing they all have in common, at least for me, is that their loutishness and dearth of decency was very blatantly apparent from the first time I ever set eyes on them in their public positions. Now I know I do not possess any special powers of observation, so the question is why these characters (and many others like them, especially most career politicians) are reverred for so long prior to their downfall? Why are their bad characters ignored and even glorified?

One Hundred Twenty Three: Illinois Regulation of Business

This past week I represented a corporate client (CC) in a hearing before the Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL). The hearing arose from an unpaid wage claim made against CC by a disgruntled agent of a former independent contractor to CC (the independent contractor was fired for stealing from CC). The claimant submitted no proof of employment, and could not meet the statutory definition of an "employee" under the Act, and admitted several times that he worked for someone other than CC. Nevertheless, the hearing officer (HO) found that the claimant was an employee because he had a tee shirt with the CC logo on it. I presented sworn affidavits from claimant's actual employer, which the HO seemed unable to comprehend. The HO was a classic incompetent and bumbling career bureaucrat of the worst sort. She was inclined to accept the claimant's position that he was an employee of CC because he had a tee shirt with the CC logo on it.

The worst part of this situation is that the Illinois legislature has now amended the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act to criminalize employers who defend their companies against these bogus claims. It should come as no surprise that businesses are running from Illinois in droves to avoid being squeezed by political extortion.

One Hundred Twenty Two: September 11, Ten Years On

It's interesting how dates and anniversaries come and go, are celebrated or marked, and just how time rolls on. Today is the ten year anniversary of the attacks of September 11, and I find myself, quite unintentionally, playing golf at the same location, and the same time, with one of the same people as ten years ago to the day. The weather appears to be the same. In many ways, I am the same, but of course older and hopefully wiser. On the lighter side, I know my golf game is better, having played probably 400 rounds in the interim.

A few of the important items for me in the past ten years:

I suffered a grand mal seizure and almost died.
My oldest son left college and enlisted in the Navy, where he has remained for the past seven years.
My youngest son and I went to Alaska, twice.
My wife had major back surgery, from which there has been limited recovery.
My father, mother-in-law, and two of my best AA friends have died.
A best friend's wife has beat cancer.
A best friend's sole surviving daughter died.
We have done major remodeling projects on both of our houses.
The media have created, described and benefited from countless crises.
The stock market has gone up and down.
Politicians have told innumerable self-serving lies.

It would interesting to know what others think has happened in my life during this same period. Probably not much.