toastykitten

Michael Moore's Sicko on Google Video

Haven't watched it yet.

Dammit, link doesn't work anymore. Oh well.

Does anyone know anything about it? Or have any information on what to do if someone gets balance-billed?

My body doesn't like me. My health insurance doesn't like me, either, seeing as how my routine Ob-Gyn appointment got denied a month after it happened, and I just got charged $303.00 for it. I hate being female right now.

In other news, once I got home I got caught up on a lot of TiVo. Mark needs to quit sucking me into his shows, because it's cutting into my reading time.

Battlestar Galactica - Yay! I liked this last episode much better than the week before, although if they're going to make all the major female characters have baby lust for the rest of the season I will be seriously annoyed. Also, I love Gaeta. Who is the black Cylon dude? What does he do? Where did he go? (Obviously I didn't really watch the first two seasons. I thought they were kind of boring.) I am kind of bored with Lee and his fat suit is terrible. Loved Tigh and Ellen's scenes.

Project Runway - Uli was robbed. Ok, I am biased because I cannot stand that twat Jeffrey. I don't care if he loves his son; he was a dickhead to everyone else and he looks like a Cardassian. I really wanted Michael to win, but his collection was by far the weakest of the four.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip - I totally can't follow the dialogue. I'm starting to like Jordan/Amanda Peet more now, since she actually seems to be acting in her scenes now instead of just saying her lines. The sketches are so unfunny it completely distracts me from the rest of the show. And really, who the fuck makes sketch comedy from 16th century literature? The parts of the show that are not the sketches are pretty good, especially Matthew Perry. Nate Corddry is cute, too.

The Daily Show - Ohmygod Samantha Bee made a couple of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret jokes! "We must, we must, increase our busts!" Hee. I read that book over and over again in the third grade and I prayed that my period would never come. Obviously, God wasn't there.

Heroes - Interesting. It's moving too slowly for me, and I wish the dialogue were better. But I love Claire the cheerleader and Hiro the enthusiastic Japanese otaku. His pal Ando is quickly turning into a favorite, too.

Whenever I'm feeling a little bored, I like to go to the Medical Board Enforcement Public Document Search page to dig up dirt on doctors. The site pulls up PDFs of legal documents for these California doctors; I don't know when they made these publicly available, but they are fascinating. Or maybe I should say horrifying. I can't link to any person directly, but if you just type in random last names like "Jones" or "Smith" you can get a lot of stuff. Some of these are fairly benign - citations for forgetting to report a change of address, for example, but others you could make whole novels out of. The most interesting ones are the ones with the type: Accusation/Petition to Revoke. These are the accusations that could get a doctor's license suspended or revoked, for things such as sexual harassment, prescription abuse, etc. Some of these include:

1. The alcoholic who performed a C-section while drunk. And relapsed after being ordered to go through rehab.
2. Sleeping with a psychiatric patient with well-documented mental illnesses and then moving in with her. Oh, and getting her pregnant. Then dumping her.
3. Misdiagnosis leading to serious illness or death. Incompetence leading to serious illness or death. Negligence leading to serious illness or death.
4. Filling and refilling prescriptions for drugs such as Xanax for known drug addicts.
5. Prescribing Xanax, Vicodin, Prozac, Vibraymycin, Ambien, Zoloft and Efflexor all at/around the same time for the same depressive patient. And refilling them without ever seeing the patient.

Yeah, so is your doctor in here? I hope not. You know what's really scary? Some of these people get their licenses back.

In the midst of administering chest compressions to a dying woman several days after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dr. Mark N. Perlmutter was ordered to stop by a federal official because he wasn't registered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Then, the Coast Guard official informed the group that he could not credential them or guarantee tort coverage and that they should return to Baton Rouge. "That shocked me, that those would be his concerns in a time of emergency," Gerhart said.

They most certainly could have credentialed him. BoardCertifiedDocs: "In support of the emergency response efforts in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, Elsevier is working with the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) to provide free, urgent credentials verifications. As authorities respond to the emergency in the Gulf Area, there may be a need to access board certification information for disaster credentialing purposes.

For assistance with verifications, please email our team directly at abms.feedback@elsevier.com. You can also contact our editorial team at (866) 352-5001."

It takes less than a minute to check a physician's credentials, once you are given a username and password. FEMA is worse than useless.

Women in Free Software, by Fernanda G. Weiden

Great article on barriers to entry for females in the free software world; don't read the discussion threads unless you want to bang your head against the wall, which might, in fact, actually be less painful than listening to people say stuff like "There's no such thing as a gender barrier; it's UP to YOU to make it happen!"

Apparently 9/11 is an occasion for gaudy, tacky memorials. SBC Park put up one right around their Willie Mays statue. I shit you not, it was a gigantic glitter American flag ribbon, surrounded by huge purple banners of names or some such thing; I didn't get close enough to read. (I wondered where the SUV was.) I couldn't take my eyes off the huge, ugly thing; it seemed to me to represent the worst aspects of American culture - the sentimentality, the exaggeration, the thoughtlessness, when it should have been a day of reflection, of remembrance.

Speaking of Ugly Americanism, I bought Vanity Fair again. I should just subscribe to them already.

(Is it me, or is it kind of disingenuous of James Wolcott to be bitching about "the media", when he is the very friggin personification of it? I mean, I agree with his stuff, but come on, he works for a national magazine!)

My HMO has a website. When you click on the "Contact Us" link, it takes you to an email form. There is no listing for a phone number, in case you might want to talk to an actual person. If you use the email form, you get a note saying that they won't be able to get to your email until at least 48 hours later. Last time I sent my HMO an email, it took them almost a week to respond.

I hate my HMO.

I hate my DMO, too.

I am trying not to watch the news, because I'm afraid of what I might hear. Reading stuff is making me sick already.