Three Words, One Circus; Medicare Open Enrollment.

Three words, one circus; Medicare open enrollment. On the surface, the goal seems simple enough: provide health care services for senior citizens and those who are permanently disabled. Subcutaneous exploration reveals a dark labyrinth of confusion, full of dubious pitfalls and misinformation, with little explanation for those who take time to seek it. Every year most Americans go shopping for health insurance, they call it open enrollment, and for working people who receive benefits through their employer based plans, a lot of the shopping has already been done. Still, many people find it very confusing and difficult to think through the limited amount of decision making they are left to make. Seniors have it worse; they don’t have a human resource department with trained people to make decisions; they have to do it all themselves. Making it worse, insurance companies that provide medicare benefits have to market their products to individuals like any other product, sell sell sell. Now, if seniors were well informed and companies always acted with integrity the environment might not be as threatening, but the current system has created exactly the opposite situation, and plenty of companies try to take advantage of trusting, ill informed Medicare enrollees.

Over time, many managed care organizations have carved out specific benefits to other organizations. For instance, most people have a vision plan, a dental plan, etc. Medicare is no different. The one benefit that has been carved out but is just a little different in nature than the others is the pharmacy benefit. The dental plan wants you to have great teeth, the vision plan wants your eyes to be fine. It’s in their best…

AK Yams WTF Moments of the Week: Have you driven a private jet lately?

WTF?

In a fit of what New York Congressman Gary Ackerman called “delicious irony,” the CEOs of Ford, Chrysler and GM flew their private jets to Washington DC to plead for a bailout for the struggling auto makers.

This is like panhandling on the street with Waterford Crystal. Seriously, are these guys that clueless? The following are statements from company spokespeople:

GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson: “Making a big to-do about this when issues vital to the jobs of millions of Americans are being discussed in Washington is diverting attention away from a critical debate that will determine the future health of the auto industry and the American economy.”

Chrysler spokeswoman Lori McTavish: “While always being mindful of company costs, all business travel requires the highest standard of safety for all employees.”

You can have your trained monkeys make pre-written excuses all you want, but it’s clear that you have absolutely no regard for anyone whatsoever. A private jet is the only way to secure high standard of safety? Really? You’re CEOs of car companies, not sports stars or musicians; no one will recognize you or care that you’re on the plane, unless you deliberately call attention to yourself. There’s absolutely no justification for not taking a commercial flight like a normal person. Case and point, these are not normal people. They probably don’t even see how this is even an issue. They’ve lost all of their human attributes except for greed and self-interest which are the sole things that drive them.

AK Yams

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