Author: bmagnus

The Washington Insurance Commissioner has officially done the right thing: he has denied Premera Blue Cross’s bid to become a for-profit insurer.

It took 56 pages to say “that’s a really lousy idea that will cost people money.” Basic logic says that if the company wants to be profitable at the end of the year instead of just “even,” rates must go up or expenses must go down. Perhaps both. Either way, policyholders lose.

To me, what is more interesting are the figures in the local news coverage: they insure 1.2 million people; they are the sole coverage for 850,000. In contrast, they spent $35 Million trying to become for profit. That’s $29 per person they insure that did not help a single person get medical care. To me it represents $29 too high a premium paid. They also spent $125 Million on the rollout of a new insurance plan. That’s another $104 that didn’t pay for a single office visit, medication, or treatment.

A total of $133 in wasted premiums. And they wonder why the Insurance Commissioner won’t let them become a for-profit company.

The Osaka, Japan school district is apparently going to start using RFID chips to track children. Here’s the story. Here’s another version. In short, tags will be in students coats or book bags. The tags will be monitored by devices at the school gates or doors.

Before you go running to buy raw materials for tin-foil hats, and before you call your broker to buy a bunch of RFID company stock, here’s what I think you need to know.

What this technology will do: It will track the tagged item as it enters and leaves the school. It may also note the time that the tagged item was scanned.

What this technology will not do: It will not tell “bad guys” where a child is; It will not tell parents or school officials where a child is; It will not prevent kidnappings; It will not locate missing children.

The shortcomings of this technology are: It depends on the child remembering to take the tagged item to school and remembering to take it home again; It assumes that the tagged item and the child are in the same place; It is an expensive alternative to a class roll call. Anyone expecting this initiative to reduce truancy or keep kids safe will be disappointed.

In other news, the headquarters of the National Enquirer and several other tabloids is now free of anthrax. I always felt that targeting this facility was a sign that the anthrax mailer must not be American born. Think about it. Most people do not take these “newspapers” seriously. However, if your native language was not English, you might look at the fact that there are several papers on every supermarket checkout produced by the same publisher and think to yourself “Aha! I have found the American propaganda engine!”

Just my personal opinion.

Today, a handful of news outlets reported a strange story of a man and the big fish that got away. Unfortunately, this fish got away after having been caught, processed, put on ice, carefully wrapped, put in a cooler, secured with rope, and passed through airport security. Here it is in all it’s glory, coverage from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Times, and the Associated Press. Twice.

You might be tempted to write this off — as Continental Airlines did — as “Big deal. Luggage sometimes doesn’t make it to it’s destination, and sometimes luggage doesn’t contain what people thought it did when they left for the airport.” But it is a big deal. People don’t misplace 40 pounds of fish, they don’t leave it in their hotel rooms. And the cooler didn’t vanish, just it’s contents. The fisherman is right when he says this is a security problem.

If 40 pounds of fish can vanish from a cooler without somebody saying so much as “Hey, Buddy, where’d you get the fish?” then what is there to stop 40 pounds of [insert scary biological, chemical, or radioactive agent of choice here] from showing up in a cooler? Seriously. Most people can’t put 40 pounds of fish in their pocket and act like nothing’s wrong. Somebody had to notice this, and that someboedy chose to say nothing. We live in an era when scribbling possible dialog for your novel in the margin of your crossword can get you a stern talking to from the not-so-friendly folks at the TSA, and yet beyond the security line, dozens of pounds of who-knows-what moves in and out, unmonitored.

It is past time to consider security beyond the security checkpoint. Don’t make me spell it out.

Remember that Medicare drug benefit bill? The one that the AARP supported? The one the AARP got in trouble with it’s members for supporting? (here’s what I said at the time, back before it turned out whole thing was going to cost more than planned.)

It turns out that since the bill passed, prescription drug prices have jumped an average of 3.4%, and in some cases 10%. Here’s the coverage so far: Reuters, CNN, Associated Press, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and Wired. I wonder if the venerable Alan Greenspan noticed this rather sizable rise in prices.

Really bad timing that Laura Bush is out there stumping for her husband on “the effectiveness of her husband’s tax cuts, improvements in the economy, education reforms and the Medicare prescription drug benefit for seniors.”

But I digress. The one thing that I think most people can agree on is that “Both the discount card available now and the drug coverage coming in 2006 are unnecessarily complex and too expensive.” The current “drug discount cards” are not in wide use because they are too complicated and finding people who know what is going on is difficult. Some people call the benefit such cards provide “a joke…. because the benefit there is so small.”

I don’t intend to spend much time discussing the impending feeding frenzy of the lottery for 50,000 spots in the drug coverage pilot program.

Back when this thing was passed, the AARP basically said that although it needed improvements, it was better than nothing. I submit that they were wrong; doing nothing would have been an improvement. No wonder Ernst & Young’s analysts think price controls for medications may be on the way.

I have been using computers for a long time now. I grew up around them in an era when “computer” meant a large bit of machinery in a raised-floor specially air-conditioned room. Back then, a “printer” was this gizmo almost as big as a compact car. In retrospect, people working in the computer room should probably have been wearing ear protection.

Because I have been using computers a long time, I have also used a lot of software, and it is my considered opinion that a lot of it is less than perfect. Don’t get me started on the flaws of Quicken, which I mostly use because there is no better solution. I gave you my opinion about Microsoft Office some time back. All email clients are fine if all you do is read and send nice, normal, plaintext emails, but they are all horrible, kludgy messes if your needs are any more complicated than that. The things that were supposed to make the more powerful modern email client simpler to use have instead made our computers — particularly those running windows — more vulnerable to malicious code and plain old fashioned user stupidity.

Browsers are even worse. At this very moment I have five web browsers installed on my computer. I am running two of them right now. In any given month I usually encounter at least one web site that only works properly with certain browsers; thus I need all five browsers. This is aside from web designer friends asking me to test their sites from outside their local network. Part of the problem with browsers is, in fact, web designers who put as many bells and whistles into a site as possible. Ad designers are also to blame, as they are continually trying to find ways to make web ads stand out. Here’s a thought for the fellow who invented that ad I saw a couple weeks ago that floated across my active window while I was trying to read the article, may your car break down in the middle lane of the freeway during rush hour.

Even icons stink. Two of those 5 browsers have the globe as part of their icon. I often run 3 or 4 programs at the same time with globe icons. Enough! Part of the point of an icon is so the end user can tell programs apart at a glance, without having to read the program name. When several programs use similar icons, that is no longer possible. Developers: please declare a moratorium on globe icons in your products.

And this brings me back to the reason it’s been a week since you have heard from me. No, I have not been at Apple’s WWDC. Nor do I necessarily agree with the Apple strategy of stomping on small developers in quest of the “insanely great.”

But, let me tell you, I recently started using GarageBand, and I love it. It is without a doubt the best cheap sequencer I have ever encountered.

This application has it’s limitations. This tool probably serves the needs of 90% of musicians with computers quite adequately. It is not MIDI, which means no General MIDI specification output, no SMPTE, and no export to scoring programs. It does not appear to support tempo and meter changes in the middle of a song. There are also a couple of little flaws which look like they can easily be changed in the upgrade cycle: for example, tempo is controlled by a slider, with no ability to directly enter a numerical metronome marking; adding a new track makes the new track active, but not automatically “solo,” or audible; I feel certain there are other minor annoyances I have not yet encountered.

However, the program does support a variety of time signatures, including 5/4 and 12/8. All “12” keys are available, although no distinction is made between major, minor, or modes. This actually makes things very flexible. Hit a wrong note? Just drag the note to the correct pitch in the Track Editor window! Hit it too hard, or too soft? Edit the velocity (numerically. Go figure). Individual lines can be brought into beat down to the 32nd note automatically. And if you just plain hit it at the wrong time, drag it to the right place.

But the loop browser is the pure genius of this program. This almost completely circumvents the hassle of figuring out how to enter a great drum line using a keyboard. Anybody can point and click their way to serious personal grooves, both rhythmic and harmonic, and add personal touches by attaching a keyboard, guitar, or microphone. Yes, that’s right, you can record real instruments and voices using GarageBand and the appropriate accessories. Put that in your MIDI pipe and smoke it. It won’t be Abbey Road, but what do you want from a program that comes free with a new computer?

If the virtual musical instruments and preloaded loops that come with the program aren’t enough for you, a cottage industry has cropped up that produces after-market materials for your purchase. Not only are loops and instruments available for several musical genres, there are opportunities to share your music and listen to what others can do. Keep in mind, GarageBand users range from rank amateurs to pro musicians who want to sell you an album.

Speaking of selling an album, GarageBand tracks are easily exported to iTunes, where they can be easily burned to an audio CD and shared with anyone.

Now if you don’t mind, the keyboard beckons.

It just occurred to me: did you know I’ve been at this over a year now?

Buried in a British medical journal is an article entitled Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness. There is some blog coverage of this rather sweeping proposal, including from the nice people at Boing Boing. As nearly as I can tell, there is no American media coverage of this proposal.

Now, it is a laudable thing to say “Mental health is important, and should be checked right along with your blood pressure and cholesterol levels.” It is another thing to propose putting an unknown percentage of the American population on expensive, mind altering medication. The BMJ article points out that the Bush family has some financial interest in the companies that make these drugs.

The first problem, as I see it, is who exactly is going to pay for this? Just this week a bill that would have required health plans to cover mental health problems at the same levels as physical health problems was tabled without a vote in Congress. Add to that this week’s report that 82 million Americans lacked health insurance at some point in the last 2 years, some of them even among the nice, stable folk of the middle class.

The second problem — and pardon me while I adjust my aluminum foil hat — is that I am old enough to remember instances of psychiatric fraud resulting in young people having involuntary stays in mental hospitals at insurance company expense. (This is one reason why “insurance parity” is a hard pill for insurers to swallow.) What is to stop this program from being used to control the populace? There are already cases of parents in legal trouble for not giving their children ritalin. Will there be cases of people forced to take medication? Cases of people involuntarily committed — no pesky arrest warrants or fair-and-speedy trials necessary? It isn’t just something that happens in “fiction” novels.

Let’s hope this is another proposal from President Bush that lacks substance. Like the idea of going to Mars. Failing that, let’s hope he fails to budget nearly enough money for it, an “unfunded mandate” like No Child Left Behind.