Hard to Escape Third-Party Health Payment

How entrenched is third-party payment for health care?

Consider a personal example. Recently my wife went to her doctor. She paid for the care at the time of service using funds from our Health Savings Account. She had to explain that, no, we did not want to submit the bill to insurance. She had to explain that, yes, she in fact wanted to pay for the service, at the time of service, all by herself.

So she paid the bill, and that's that, right?

Of course not. We just got a notice from our insurance company informing us that the doctor's office also billed insurance for the doctor's visit, despite the fact that my wife paid the bill at the time of service. So now we have to spend more time resolving the double-billing.

Apparently, the doctor's staff literally cannot mentally grasp the notion of paying for health care at the time of service.

Voyage to the Planets

I happened to learn of a new ABC show, Defying Gravity, over at Hulu. My wife and I watched, and mostly enjoyed, the first episode. The premise is that a group of astronauts is headed on a trip around the solar system.

But why can't somebody just do good, hard, exciting sci-fi? Defying Gravity is seriously marred by some mysterious force (alien?) on the ship that is driving events. Way to ruin a perfectly great premise.

Fortunately, the BBC show that inspired the dumbed-down, soaped-out American version, Voyage to the Planets and Beyond (originally Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets) suffers no such silliness. We Netflixed the two-hour show and really enjoyed it.

The only thing I didn't like about the BBC show (aside from its asinine PC environmentalist segment) is that it portrays a future global (meaning political) effort to explore the solar system, rather than a truly useful future of free-market space exploration. Typical of a political program, the voyage is a rushed, astronomically expensive venture with little payback for the investment. It would be absolute lunacy to send five astronauts on a three-year trip to Pluto, for example. What they should have done is spend the entire time on Mars, as Bob Zubrin suggests.

Still, part of the point of the show is simply to show the solar system, using top computer imaging based on the latest discoveries. In this goal, the show is a spectacular success. Wow, wow, and more wow. Don't miss the documentary about robotic exploration of space.

Dear YouTube: Please Charge Me!

Dear YouTube,

You have a great service. The problem is that it's "free." (I understand your owner, Google, continues to lose money on you.)

Because uploading videos to YouTube is "free," I have wasted several hours over the last three days trying to upload videos to your server. I am currently trying to upload a 9 minute, 40 second video, at medium resolution, featuring an interview with a Colorado Congressional candidate. My wait time is 16 hours. This is the third time I've tried -- and apparently failed -- to upload the video. (I have a good cable line, so I don't think that's the problem.)

Call me crazy, but I think publishing videos like this in a timely manner is healthy for our republic.

With a previous video, my wait time was up to 48 hours. (I cancelled the upload, obviously.)

YouTube is a sweet service. Just about everybody loves it. I love it. But I'd love it a whole lot more if I could pay you for improved service.

Here's just one possibility for pricing. Users could purchase credits, say one credit per dollar, perhaps with a bulk discount. You could price based on file size. Then users could make the tradeoffs between length and resolution. Charge, say, a dollar for files up to 100 megs, two dollars up to 200 megs, etc. Obviously you could adjust the actual rates based on costs, demand, advertising revenues, etc. You could even charge a premium for peak-time access.

If you already offer people the option of paying you for better upload service, I've missed it. Perhaps you or a reader will correct me. But, assuming the option is not already available, I beg you, please don't make me continue to use your service for "free!"

Sincerely,
Ari Armstong

August 10 Update: After several failed attempts to upload the video in question through iMovie, I tried uploading the file directly to YouTube and had much better success. So it's unclear to me why the iMovie upload doesn't work well, but the direct upload works better. At any rate, I'm still interested to learn how YouTube hopes to make money from its operation -- and provide users with good service in the process.

Planter's Progress

If posting has been a little slow this summer, a big part of the reason is that we've been working hard on the property.

We finally finished up the front yard. Here's the progress in pictures:







We purchased the red concrete pavers at Home Depot for 79 cents each. We bought around 250 blocks. We also got laying sand there.

We ordered a truckload of Washington Cedar Mulch from Pioneer.

The sod and flowers came from O'Tooles.

We discovered that large planters cost a fortune at garden centers. Therefore, we purchased two $30 plastic "pond" liners at Home Depot, drilled holes in the bottom, and painted them brown.