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Friday Free For All: brought to you by Cafe Luwak
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It looks like it might be raining outside. Would one of you be so kind as to go outside and check for me?
So, would I be helping or hurting Luwak if I went there for breakfast this weekend, as their head cook just left?
Despite Bill Nickels’ concern, the Ypsilanti Community Band had a great concert in Riverside Park last night and had little to no conflicts or interference with the Depot Town Cruise Night. On behalf of the community band, I’d like to thank Erik Dotzauer and the DTCDC for allowing us the opportunity — very rare in recent years — to play in one of Ypsilanti’s parks. We look forward to our next Riverside Park concert on July 16!
Carter Adler
Ypsilanti Community Band President
Not raining at the moment . . .
Dejecting news from the Supreme Court yesterday, more from Iran.
But back to health care costs, if I may. U of M charges about ten times (over $800) what other labs charge for routine blood tests. Bills show up these days without information about specific charges, so it takes a call to find out what we’re actually being charged for (or what our insurance carriers are being charged for). It is reasonable to hold medical providers to account for highly inflated charges, finding doctors who care enough to know what their patients are being charged and to speak up when they know these bills are unreasonable–without the easy solution of dismissing concern because insurance will pay most of the bill after all. And if we all spoke up . . .
Does anyone know if St. Joe’s is fairer about what it charges for routine visits and treatments? And what about the quality of care? (It would be so nice to find a doctor who seems to care and who doesn’t rush patients along too much.)
Question, I’ll bite. Why did the head cook quit?
Watching Laughing.
I still have my head cook. I lost my main breakfast cook. She left because she bought a house near Detroit and found a job closer to home. I thought she was going to stay till the end of the month, but that is the way things work in a restaurant. Gertha will be handling most of the cooking for the buffet while we are looking for a replacement, and now we know Forrest is a reasonable backup as well.
Did I hear a rumor somewhere that people were trying to show movies at the Riverside Arts Center?
Thank you, Carter. And, reading the article you linked about Mr. Nickel’s concerns, makes me wonder(I’ve posted that thought on “the jamboree” thread.) Again, the DTCDC has been put in it’s place, so to speak, by council. Will there be discussion of a new contract addressing the concerns of the council and event organizers? I was at that city council meeting. My gut feeling? “No.”
Oliva: I had a particularly bad experience with the U of M hospital several years ago (not medically bad, but unacceptably bad from a customer service perspective), and I won’t go back. I’ve had no problems with St. Joseph. I think they’re a bit on the pricy side, but I don’t think they’re nearly as expensive as U of M.
I buried a big dead raccoon in my vegetable garden.
I was once billed for a medication by a hospital that I know they hadn’t given me. When I pointed it out I was told it was in my charts, therefore I had been given it (not once but 4 times according to the bill). When I said that I guessed they were in for a lawsuit since my chart also clearly stated that I was highly allergic to it, they removed it from my bill. I went line by line and made them defend the bill. At the end of it they had to strike out multiple line items they couldn’t prove to the tune of several thousand dollars. The billing practices are obscene.
I have had major health issues. The kind that make the news.
U of M is where I started. I ended up going out of state with a smaller place, and have my routine followups at St Joe’s.
I’ve worked in medical research environments at U of M and other places. With great personal success. Clinical practice at U of M is viewed like a crack house in a neighbor city. Statement: Research does not equal patient care.
Go someplace that cares for patients. I am fortunate in that I am able to be an educated, involved participant in my own treatment.
And I am doing better now that I would have if I had been a U of M patient.
YMMV. IMH (but educated) Opinion.
re. Medical (Not) Care . . .
My husband had a wart on his hand burned off, almost an afterthought at the end of his annual physical, took a moment. He was billed hundreds of dollars (up near a thousand, I think) . . . for vaginal wart removal. It took about a half-year for UM to get the billing straightened out.
I finally found a UM doctor who was absolutely engaged and interactive, loved her. Poof, she was gone. But an intern who had sat like a wooden doll and looked blankly when I spoke to her, had not one helpful thing to say, was hired. I’ve tried to find out where the superb doctor went after being let go by UM, but nobody seems to know. She was a treasure on the patient care front.
Olivia. I keep finding wonderful UofM doctors up at the UofM doctor’s office on Arnet. But they are all residents so they only last a couple of years.
Anyways, I’ve had a billing conflict with UofM but now I feel that I got off lucky because it was only a hundred bucks.
I accidentally veered off to griping (to the land of self-interest) instead of staying with the bigger point (our collective well-being): how to convince medical providers to be more fair about what they’re charging, getting doctors to realize and care about what their patients are being charged, get the medical care providers to stop saying, “Oh, insurance will pay for it.” Not that I don’t see the tricks the insurance carriers are using to try to get out of paying bills, which is also no good. How to fix the broken system so that there is an actual and significant improvement for as many of us as possible? Such a complex mess with deep roots and tangled relations–and yet . . . if we all start clamoring . . .
It just occured to me how much free press your blog has been getting lately, thanks to the Aggressive Moderation links to your blog in the online snooze, the Ypsitucky links to your blog on various online places, and the Bob DeNiro stripper letter in Maxim. This is really turning out to be the year of the Maynard. Time to up the ad fees, or reach out to less local business, like ones all the way out on Carpenter Rd.
You said anything. Have a listen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOFRWb8bYew
So then, no movies at RAC?
Jake, it’s supposed to be a fish you bury when you plant your garden, not an entire raccoon.
Stands to reason that a raccoon might work even better!
The real story, Lisele, is that somebody hit it in the street, then some nice person dragged its bloated body up on the sidewalk in front of our house. It was pointed out to me that there was more than enough raccoon to really stink up the place, so somebody had to do something. Somebody meaning me. I couldn’t come up with a better idea, so its buried in a shallow grave in my garden with a big tree stump rolled over it so other critters wouldn’t dig it up. Luckily my watermelons weren’t growing, so I had a nice patch to put in it. I had been sad about the watermelons, but see how everything always works out in the end?
You can still replant them. Plenty of time. Here’s one that’s only 75 days — http://www.seedsavers.org/Details.aspx?itemNo=778 — Blacktail Mountain.
For my birthday gift one year my husband–not my husband yet at the time, but it helped convince me–went and took a dead tom cat who had been lying on a berm just east of Superior Rd., out there in the open, for too many days, and buried him in the garden, then planted moonflowers. The plant over the cat grew outlandishly, while another one planted elsewhere didn’t get close in size. Hoping he was only at life 1 of his 9 and thanking him for those moonflowers.
I like all the roadkill stories in this post which is sponsored by the Luwak breakfast buffet.
Sorry, Jim.