Netflix has two movies I watched yesterday, almost back-to-back. What a fascinating contrast these selected scenes provide.
This one is about Major League Baseball.
This one is about Mortgage-Backed Securities.
Brad Pitt, playing the real life Billy Beane, sees the future and is scrambling to get ahead of it. Jeremy Irons, playing a fictional CEO, is doing likewise. In each scene, a whiz kid is called upon to share his insights.
Following up on an earlier post, Massachusetts General Hospital has withdrawn its expansion plans for suburban outpatient facilities. Boston’s best in TV news, Katie Brace, has the details.
Katie, a Massachusetts native, is a Boston Marathon runner, and she has participated in Reach the Beach. When I ran the 200-mile event, I was one of twelve team runners. Katie was on an ultra team, with only six runners covering the distance from Mount Washington to the New Hampshire coast.
For a long time, Katie was with WBZ-TV, Boston’s CBS affiliate. After Covid hit, the station slashed its news department and Katie was one of the staff who was let go. Katie’s many fans (2,200 Facebook followers, 4,200 on Twitter) were glad when she announced she’d be staying in Boston, at NBC10.
I have learned that my former employer has, with only one day’s notice, announced background checks on all employees. Is management exempting itself? I’m still a shareholder. Maybe I should ask them.
The company has never had an HR department. A firm I’ve never heard of, Checkr, has been hired to conduct the background checks.
A quick check shows Checkr having a good reputation overall. But being right 9 out of 10 times isn’t good enough when someone’s livelihood is at stake.
Over a period of fifteen years I traveled to many rural American hospitals. Some of them were a long drive from a large airport. Others had a connecting flight aboard a twin-prop plane to a small regional airport.
In the years since then, some of those hospitals have closed. The crisis in rural healthcare continues to worsen.
Some hospitals here in greater Boston have closed, but for a very different reason. There were too many of them. Competitive pressures are ongoing, with Massachusetts General Hospital pursuing what some see as aggressive expansion plans.
Every six months I drive into downtown Boston for an appointment with an eye specialist. In late 1999, after suffering a spontaneous retinal detachment, I was left for blind by an incompetent eye surgeon in Worcester. I was referred to him by a optometrist in a neighboring town, who delayed seeing me after doubting my claim of a detached retina.
My sight was saved by a specialist at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear infirmary, who I found only because my boss’ wife worked there. Based on my own experience, the closer you get to Boston the better the medical care is.
P.S. This ad happened to pop up on Facebook. An ad for the place where my botched eye surgery was done.
“They’re not the most complicated things in the world.” — Kyle Kopec, 22, on managing hospitals
Kyle, it’s good that you’re enthusiastic about your challenging job at Braden Health, but if you last long enough doing it you’ll learn — and I hope admit — that hospitals are very complicated.
I had a visa to install a medical laboratory system in Pakistan.
The night before my scheduled flight out of Boston, a bus was firebombed outside of the Karachi hospital where I was going to work. As I watched the event on the CBS Evening News, my boss called and asked, “You seeing this?” With no need to specify what “this” was, I said “Yep.” He had just gotten off the phone with the big boss, and I was told, “You’re not going.” I never did, due to ongoing political unrest in Pakistan, culminating that year in the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73.
