After checking in and being called back to see the doctor, a nurse takes my height, weight and blood pressure. I wait. When my doctor comes in (it’s the first time I’ve met him), he first asks if I am married. I say yes. He next asks if I am allergic to anything. I said no. Then … he asks if I hurt myself on the job. Seriously. The second he heard it was my back, he was asking if it was an on the job injury. I suppose I should have answered yes – after all I think I tweaked it (start laughing now) while reading a book in preparation for my Money and Banking class. Seriously. I managed to contort myself into a bowling alley chair and stay there for an hour or so, and couldn’t get up after an hour of reading. He asked that question before asking exactly how I injured it or what I thought happened or how it felt or anything like that. Are medical practices for treating backs any different if I hurt it while shoveling snow in my yard or shoveling snow while on the job? Are doctor reimbursements higher if it is a possible workers’ comp case? Lower? Is there more paperwork to file? I tried to ask him why he made this his third question to me … but before I could get my question out, he was onto his next one …

“I know you are married. But if you are having sex with other women, you should wear protection.” He mumbled something after this, but I was too busy retrieving my tongue after it rolled out on the floor in astonishment to have paid much attention to that. And before I could ask what the heck that was for, he was onto yet another couple of questions which are surely going to make my back heal up quicker …

“Do you have a working fire alarm and carbon monoxide detector in your house?” Seeing the apoplexy building in me caused my doctor to finally chime in that, “New York State now forces me to ask these questions.” I asked him what the clinical purpose for these questions was and he quickly went to his computer to log in my answers. Yes – big brother in New York State is using my doctor to make sure I have a working fire and carbon monoxide detector in my house. If my doctor does not log these in for each patient he sees, he is at risk of losing his medical license one supposes.

Finally after finishing his examination, I proceed to the check-out desk to pay for my office visit. Remember, I have a high-deductible catastrophic plan coupled with a health savings account, presumably so I would be price sensitive to my medical purchases. When I asked what the total bill for the visit would be I was told $180. Fine, sounds fair (does it?) so I took out my card to pay it from my health savings. The clerk told me however that I am not allowed to pay the entire bill for the office visit. She said she could, at most, let me pay half ($90) and that she had to submit the visit to the insurance company for review, and that I would receive a bill for the remainder of the visit in three weeks’ time. It would not have mattered if I had $500 in cash to pay her at the desk she told me, the visit still had to be submitted for review to Excellus, and then they would actually decide (in concert with the doctors’ office) how much ultimately my visit would cost me.

There were some other gems uncovered during this visit (which lasted a total of 17 minutes – 6 of which was doctor time with me, 6 of technical assistant time with me, and 5 minutes of waiting for the doctor and doing paperwork to check in and check out), but we’ll leave those for another day. I present the above information without comment.

Illustration: George’s diner records food inspector in New York City. When not being recorded, the inspector awards the diner an A for cleanliness. When we try to measure and examine what the inspector is doing, well, things change.

Chrysler employs 52,000.

On the bright side, at least they each have the same puppetmaster.

California voters — unskeptical, unrealistic, and gullible — nevertheless trusted their elected and unelected technocrats in Sacramento to be telling them the truth when they agreed to a $9.95 billion bond issue for high speed rail.  It turns out, even according the HSR’s most fervent supporters, that the numbers that were used to sell the bond issue were total crap,

…

So they told they public the rail line would have 117 million annual riders, when even an estimate of 5 million is probably high.  Jeff Skilling is in jail for a far less substantial exaggeration of his business prospects.

Of course voters were idiots to accept these numbers, when 5 minutes of research would have shown them absurd (the media did nothing to help, of course).  One relevent factoid:

The current air passenger traffic between LAX and SFO is 2.7 million a year

But we are going to have tens of millions of rail customers.  Right.

as

And going back to the BS from the BLS, as John Lohman’s chart below shows that in 2011 initial and continuing claims have been revised higher the week following 91% and 100% of the time, respectively. A purely statistical explanation for this phenomenon is “impossible.”

I am sure it is just one tiny isolated series of 52 incidents.

UPDATE: for some of you interested in the science of global warming, here is another link from Coyote. As he puts it, it is the “dinosaur bone to the creationists” data. A summary?

The bottom line:

The models say the Earth system ought to accrue energy at the rate of 3W/m². Instead the best estimate we have of recent energy balance suggests we’ve been losing energy at a rate of about 0.1 W/m² (Knox and Douglass 2010). The models don’t match the observations.

There is no getting around it. The models are wrong. The energy balance is so central that none of their other predictions can be relied on.

Ocean Heat Content conpared to models

Today was the first in what promises to be a series of meetings involving the EPA, community leaders, local officials and representatives of the refineries. It tended to confirm the concerns I expressed about the illegitimacy of the environmental justice agenda. The meeting began with Al Armendariz, Administrator for EPA’s South Central Region (Region 6), making a comment to the effect that the refineries in Corpus Christi have enjoyed several years of “record profits,” and that they need to step up and fund solutions for the community.

This is not just a non sequitur, it is a completely inappropriate use of the EPA’s powers. The EPA has no mandate to carry out income redistribution programs. It enforces federal air and water quality standards. For the EPA to use its regulatory powers to try to compel companies subject to its jurisdiction to …

Silly John. I bet you think that the role of housing policy is just about ensuring everyone has a place to live too, right?