{"id":16278,"date":"2012-11-27T09:06:17","date_gmt":"2012-11-27T14:06:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=16278"},"modified":"2012-11-27T09:32:22","modified_gmt":"2012-11-27T14:32:22","slug":"mulling-and-wondering-about-manners-and-medical-bills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/?p=16278","title":{"rendered":"Mulling and wondering about manners and medical bills"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Am I too late? BMO yields 4.88%. Canada and its bank stocks are doing fine, I believe. Am I wrong?<\/p>\n

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Larry Davis sells printing for United Book Press of Baltimore.<\/strong><\/span> His prices are OK. Not brilliant. But his service is brilliant. United is printing the latest (and greatest) edition of my dictionary — the 27th. What’s good about Larry (and his people like Helen Johnson) is\u00a0 they respond. Send them an email. You’ll have a reply within minutes. Send them a request. It’s done in minutes.<\/p>\n

Why am I writing this? Simply, most people don’t respond. It’s annoying and bad business.<\/p>\n

The worst “non-responders” in American business are the people who should be the most responsive — the nation’s public relations “professionals.” You won’t believe how many times I call public relations people at large companies only to be dumped into voice mail, and never get a call-back.<\/p>\n

Maybe these people really don’t care, though they’re paid to care. I suspect most are bone lazy. Public relations is a dead end job. But you’d think their bosses would insist they carry smartphones and take calls from reporters. Heck, the good PR you can get for free on the Internet is infinite. But the bad PR you get from not having the facts straight is also infinite.<\/p>\n

I’m sitting here awaiting a call back from Apple. It used to be ultra-responsive. Suddenly, it no longer is. And it’s reflected in the stock price. I bet there’s some relationship. AT&T is useless.<\/p>\n

Oh yes. And finally, learn to say Thank You. Many, many times I’ve written something nice about a product I bought and liked. The day the piece came out, I’ll send a “Heads-up” email to the company’s PR department. 99% of the time I don’t get a simple “Thank You<\/em>” email.\u00a0 And they wonder why they rarely receive any more free ink” from yours truly.<\/p>\n

The world is hard enough without dropping your manners. Teach your people some.<\/p>\n

Medical care is getting get more expensive.<\/strong><\/span> My orthopedic sports doctor at the Hospital for Special Surgery insists on cash. No insurance. He won’t submit paperwork to Medicare or your insurance company because (I”m guessing) it takes too much of his time. The crazy health industry is going big-time complex electronic — from ICD 9 coding to ICD 10 coding. ICD 9 has 18,000 codes. ICD 10 has 155,000 codes. Every time a doctor wants to submit a bill to an insurance company he (or his coder) has to figure out which of 155,000 codes his procedure fitted into. Insanity has no bounds. Hospitals will soon be spending $4 billion on “coders”, up from today’s $2.4 billion. And you wondered why your healthcare was getting very pricey.<\/p>\n

For more, read this New York Times piece on Dealing With Doctors Who Take Only Cash.. Click here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

From this weeks’ New Yorker:<\/p>\n

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Don’t drive too close to taxis.<\/strong><\/span> My friend”s Mercedes got doored by a passenger who flung the door open without looking. It took out my friend’s mirror and caused a scrape along the entire side of his car. Cost $3,500.\u00a0 He should have known better. Bicyclists know if they see a taxi stop and the vacant light on the roof comes on that the door will be flung open by an idiot passenger.<\/p>\n

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Harry Newton who is still fiddling with the layout of my emailed column.<\/p>\n

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Am I too late? BMO yields 4.88%. Canada and its bank stocks are doing fine, I believe. Am I wrong? Larry Davis sells printing for United Book Press of Baltimore. His prices are OK. Not brilliant. But his service is brilliant. United is printing the latest (and greatest) edition of my dictionary — the 27th. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}