NewscomaGot A Two-Pack Habit And A Motel Tan

I was going through our medical bills this morning and I found about $264 dollars that the Vanderbilt Medical Center charged me for a test that according to my doctor ended up being “not processed properly as ordered.” No where on the bill is the $264 credited. There was also a $45 blood test that did yield results according to my MD. My insurance company credited the $309 bill $222.04 for “contractual discount,” which friends in the medical profession tell me is a standard discount that insurance companies give to hospitals for supplies and service. And my MD tells me that I will need to do the test over again in the future.

Do you see the problem here? Not only is the hospital going to make a percentage of the $87.00 that they say I owe on a test that they screwed up, but the insurance company is going to count a percentage of the $222 they paid toward a total lump sum of expenses that they will use to calculate in the future costs to be passed along to consumers. Once I am charged a second time for the test, then both the medical and insurance entrepreneurs will be guilty of double-dipping. If the hospital labs screwed up the test, then the hospital should eat the loss and not pass them along to their consumers and the insurance company discount should not be paid on the charges.

I offer this to you because I’m about to get my own degree in alchemy and start boiling homemade roots that will most likely make me see my grandfather that I adored and died 28 years ago. And get naked in Wal Mart. These things happen when people need help.

Health care, campers, is a big deal.

Out of control, even those with insurance. A nightmare for those without it.

Mike responds to a back-handed compliment singling him out in the Nashville City Paper’s Political Animals post written by editor Clint Brewer.

This jab at bloggers looks like the flip side of the mainstream media’s presumptive disdain for people whom they think sit around in their pajamas all day and try to copy what they do themselves. So, if they’re not writing about the City Paper’s stories, then bloggers must be taking the day off because God knows, we’re not doing anything else. It’s another example of how the press doesn’t get it.

I think some folks in the press do get it but not all of them. Jack Lail has been an ambassador and spokesperson about the value of blogging and new digital media creating a lot of good will around the community and the whole country while still remaining local in Knoxville. I try to encourage people to blog although I find my community, which is based in a college town, is more focused on MySpace and Facebook quite frankly.

With that said, Mike does bring up a good point in his post regarding good will at newspapers toward the blogging community. I don’t know the history between Brewer and Enclave but I do know that telling any blogger that writes for free that they should write about something which appears in the newspaper is only going to stir the pot and highly piss people off. Bloggers write about what interests them and they do it out of a passion for writing, a political agenda, focusing on their hobbies, social interaction and the list goes on.

I think it is highly possible for there to be a marriage between traditional media and the blogosphere. I do. However, I do think that some people, in my non-virtual world in the news biz as well, do not understand we live in a new world of media, anyone can self-publish and blogging is an organic process, one that cannot be forced.

Enclave is a great resource in Nashville for what is going on in his community. His content is original. I have called him before one of Nashville’s best hyperlocal bloggers. Mr. Brewer did commend him but it was done with snark and the compliment got lost in Brewer’s chiding. I reacted as well.

I only know a handful of paid bloggers. Newsrooms are losing people due to downsizing but that’s another story for another day. I think those folks in news need to remember people who blog do it because they want to, not because they feel a loyalty to a newspaper.

They blog because they love it.

My two cents.

Just talk to him.

He isn’t going away.

And, sweetie, this is a new world.  Yeah, you may not dig it, but …

It isn’t going away .

And that’s a good thing.