Watching The World Go By...

I know, I know, I really need to work on my Olympic Spirit.  

In my defense, the first Olympic Games I recall were the 1972 Munich games.  And any student of history or a person who was alive back then knows what happened.  So I guess it's probably fair to say that going back that far, pretty easy to understand why I'm not a huge fan of the Olympics.  I do have some positive memories of them, but there's also the 2008 Olympics, I spent most of that stuck in the hospital learning I was diabetic and dealing with an infected leg.  

So other than that, the news is, well, the news.  Things change, things stay the same, and my neighborhood...  Well, same thing.  

Earlier this summer a house across the main drag from where I live changed hands.  The previous occupants were quiet and fans of a football team - I'm not sure if the banners in their front yard were for the 49ers or Kansas City, but they were quiet.  The home is now occupied by a number of young men who seem utterly focused on their cars.  One of them drives a crapped-out Pontiac Fiero with mange - that is, the body panels, every single one, vary in the color of gray.  So my guess is he's experimenting with either different primers, doesn't give a crap, or doesn't know what he's doing.  That much is extremely obvious by the extremely loud exhaust, and the way he drives it.  

Every single one of them has adopted the BMW tuning, as my son calls it - running the engine slightly rich so that there's a sort of "crackle" in the exhaust when they lift their feet from the accelerator.  I always thought quieter was better, not so loud that you couldn't hear yourself think.  Having endured the former policy of this state where every motor vehicle had to endure an annual exhaust check and pass an emissions test, I know none of their vehicles could if we were still doing it - but I'm about a week away from calling the police and filing a noise complaint.  Every single evening they're working on their cars, every one of the five vehicles in their driveway starts and the roar, even across a busy double-lane road and frontage roads, is so loud I think it's a car in MY driveway.  

So yes, kids, I am becoming that cranky old man who yells "get a muffler and a tuneup!".  

Beyond that, life continues.  Work is still work, a job I enjoy, am getting better at every day, and watching changes in how we do that work is causing me to really wish I'd won the lottery somewhere along the line - the cash lottery, not the job lottery - because recent changes in how we work is making it abundantly clear that our previous methodology was a bit suspect.  Basically, where previously we checked every patient who came through the queue, we are now only checking those patients who are going to start on service for us.

What I do is ask patient's insurers if they will cover the service we provide.  That is, I use web site documentation, web portals, or the phone and faxes to ask if the service the patient's doctor has said is required will be something the insurance company will consider as possibly medically necessary and therefore covered when we present a bill, down the road a few weeks.  Yeah, listening to the disclaimers on the phone daily has made me very aware the insurance companies have the power, and all we can do, the we being those of us who send portions of our paychecks to them to be sure that when terrible things happen to us, we might have the chance to get better.  

I know, I'm in the minority, but there are some pretty horrific cases that cross my desk, and all I can do is thank the people who review them and tell us yeah, we may well consider paying you.  My clearing rate is good, I get a lot of work done, accurately, and the insurers pay us when the time comes.  So I got that going for me, which is good.