I love my local newspaper, The (New London) Day, and have subscribed to it since we moved here 20 years ago. I don’t read the national AP stories in it anymore since I have already read them on line, but the local and state news is still fresh. My favorite section is the Opinion Page which never fails to entertain with its outrageous letters.

Off subject, but is anyone else totally icked out by the “Big Love” raid in Texas?

And this just kills me, because with Craigslist and Monster, I’m interacting with classies more than ever. I search “grosse pointe” and whatever else strikes my fancy on Craigslist every day. I have RSS feeds set up to find interesting job openings with my keywords. When I think I could be doing this through a former newspaper, I want to cry.

And you know what? Many of them STILL DON’T GET IT. By now, “Craigslist” should be part of every journalist’s baseline vocabulary, and I still run into people I have to explain it to. Or they go to the site and, seeing the plain-vanilla interface, think it’s some kind of amateur operation. It’s like they’re not paying attention. (The weekend of the Goeglein affair, I rewarded myself with a $300 Tiffany necklace that I picked up for $75 on CL. And yes, it’s authentic.)

Alex, the woman who tracks health-care spending at GM — one of them, anyway — said she can tell which drug is being heavily advertised simply by watching their cash flow. When I was a J-fellow, the people from overseas were simply flabbergasted by direct-to-consumer advertising; one of the Turks cracked us up in a seminar, badgering some guy from Pfizer. “And then there is a man on the beach running with his golden retriever, and the announcer is saying, ‘Ask your doctor if this is right for you.’” All in his Turkish accent. It was hilarious.

Alas, it eventually wasn’t enough to pay for decent health insurance. Now I’m in an HSA through my employer. $3K deductible per year for all treatment and prescriptions before the insurance kicks in, but then it pays 100 percent of everything, which ain’t a bad deal if you’re anticipating the eventual $100K heart attack. Kind of like traditional insurance plans were, it was explained to me, before people began running to the ER for every pimple and tummy ache and demanding to try every prescription drug advertised on television.

In my current occupation (which involves writing of the dryest sort), I work on behalf of the insurance industry in “loss prevention,” which is to say litigation. When you see the sheer magnitude of fraud and misrepresentation in insurance claims, you begin to understand why it costs so damn much and why carriers treat each and every claim with suspicion. They’re still money-grubbing fuckmooks, though, and so’s big pharma and the hospitals.

I may be biting the big teat in the sky that feeds me, but I’m not afraid to say the system needs a major overhaul. So does consumer credit. I hope Congress will find the political will to work on these, the two biggest problems facing the American middle class. You know, besides homosexuality and flag burning.

I didn’t choose to be a writer; it chose me.

Among the nice things about being a writer is that “equal protection of the laws” clause in the Bill of Rights. If someone steals a 25c loaf of bread from Scott’s Discount Foods, they could go to jail for months. When Scott’s Discount Foods stole a $300 piece of writing from me, told me they decided against using it, and then six months later, I discovered that they’d printed it anyway, I found that the federal prosecutor couldn’t be bothered to enforce criminal violation of the copyright code. She said I had other remedies available to me, such as paying an IP lawyer $10,000 to take it to federal court - no small claims court actions allowed! - and then wait up to ten years to wend my way through the courts. Here’s a quick math problem for you: what’s $10,000 at 6% interest for 10 years? Yes, it would cost $6,000 in foregone interest to collect that $300. Unless my lawyer was to screw up, in which case, it would cost me $10,000 plus $6,000 in foregone interest to NOT collect that $300.

Universal health care is a noble, and virtuous thing. But anyone who has navigated a large HMO or government health system (like Tricare for the military) will tell you that it doesn’t always work out like you think.

There are delays, inefficiency, missed appointments, not enough doctors, etc., etc., etc. I spent over a decade in the Army. I would wait 6-9 months for a pediatric psychiatry appointment for my autistic son.

You don’t seem to understand triage.

Napoleon’s medics realized that some soldiers were going to die, no matter how much effort they put into saving them. Some soldiers were going to recover anyway, and doctors couldn’t speed that up, or make the recovery more complete, no matter how much effort they invested in the soldier.

But there were some soldiers, where prompt medical attention would mean the difference between life and death. They get priority treatment.

You know what causes autism? If so, you’re the only person in the world who does. There are a lot of theories floating around, none of them proven. You know how to cure autism? If so, you’re the only person in the world who does. My wife is a TSS, currently working with kids in the autism spectrum disorder. You can give them tools for coping with their problem, but that’s the work of a therapist. Psychiatrists don’t do that; they write prescriptions, and there’s no medication that’s worth a darn for autism.

So when it comes to scheduling appointments, your case would be pretty low priority.

Now, consider something that’s fixable. Your back has gone out, and you can hardly stand upright. Call up ten doctors, tell five of them that you have pretty good insurance, being a postal carrier, and tell the other five that you’re self-employed and have no insurance at all. You think having no insurance at all will get you an appointment sooner?

Simplicity? Have you been to a doctor? Like, ever?

I’ve been hospitalized 14 times in my life, and my first wife spent 16 years dying of SLE. Yeah, I’m familiar with the drill.

http://www.nhandan.com.vn/english/

It’s really only in the last few years that big advertisers have begun to “get” the internet, and as a result online ad rates, at least on premium properties, are beginning to creep up. But online is still an absurd bargain for advertisers, and it puts a real squeeze on newspapers as they have to settle for reduced online ad revenue as their print revenue declines along with circulation.

A bigger problem is that the papers missed the boat on online classified ads. All the private party advertising went to ebay, and employment, which used to be a gigantic cash cow, went to Monster, Dice, etc. I used to work in advertiser marketing in a big city daily, and I remember our sense of disbelief as we watched the brass dither around while this business that they could have completely owned crept away.

I don’t know what’s to be done about this. That revenue is gone, and it’s not coming back, even if online display rates reach parity with print.