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I received a statement from Blue Cross/Blue Shield, saying my wife wasn’t covered for a hospital visit she had back in June, and I would be responsible for the $2000 in charges. She did indeed have an appointment there in June, but not on that day. The form said she didn’t have insurance on the day services were provided, which of course she would have, if she had been at the hospital that particular day.

So what was the problem? The hospital had sent BC/BS a bill for charges belonging to another woman who happens to have my wife’s name. BC/BS claimed innocence, that it was the hospital’s mistake, but they also screwed up. The statement had the wrong middle initial for my name, which was what made me suspicious in the first place.

It was possible, if unlikely, that the woman with my wife’s name is married to a man with my name, but I was told by BC/BS that their computer system had replaced my middle initial with my wife’s. Having spent more than 30 years in the healthcare computing business I felt confident in saying to the representative, “unless somebody entered that by mistake manually, that’s a bug in your software, and you need to kick this upstairs.”

Speaking of healthcare, this is worth watching…

Watch Making Sen$e: Competing Claims About Healthcare Reform on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Way back in April, 2007 I used this picture in a post I called “Legal Loan Sharking.”

After the credit crisis hit in September, 2008, I hoped these sleazy mortgage ads would disappear from the Internet but, no, they’re still there. Yahoo is a big offender. Here’s a current example.

“The President Waives Refi Requirement??” Hey, if you believe that, I can sell you a pair of X-Ray specs that will let you see through a girl’s clothes. What sort of slimy boiler room operations are behind these online ads, anyway? Here’s another one.

What does the Better Business Bureau say about Power4Home? Nothing good. Whenever anybody tells you they know some mysterious secret or trick that will make your car get better mileage, or a diet that will melt pounds off like magic, or whatever, it’s a come-on, if not an outright scam. Period. As Captain Braddock used to say at the end of each episode of Racket Squad, “Remember, there are people who can slap you on the back with one hand, and pick your pocket with the other… and it could happen to you!”

http://youtu.be/zEvtOo_O_Cw

Since the recession began in early 2008, a college degree hasn’t necessarily led to a good paying job, or any job at all. There are now five graduating classes of unemployed or underemployed college graduates. To make matters worse, some grads have almost as much debt as their parents did when they bought their first house. As an article in The New York Times explains, collecting money owed by students with government-backed loans is now a booming business.

Forty years ago, when I was a senior in high school, it made some sense to enter the job market rather than head off to college. This was especially true for boys, because the military draft was ending (thank you, Richard Nixon!). Before then, for a lot of young men the value of college was that it meant getting a draft deferment and avoiding, or at least delaying, being sent to Vietnam. By the time I graduated from college, jobs were few and far between, and pay scales were depressed, thanks to the huge numbers of us Baby Boomers looking for work. I remember reading about Harvard grads driving cabs. I know a couple of guys my age who did very well by not spending four more years sitting in class after high school, and they got a jump start on the rest of us.

In the decades since then, the idea of getting a college education for its own sake has pretty much disappeared, but I feel strongly that college shouldn’t be seen solely as a place for vocational training. Getting a college education helps people to become informed, thoughtful citizens and voters. I think there’s a lot of value in taking college-level courses in Philosophy, History, Sociology, Psychology, and Economics, which is what my degree is in. Economics is an academic major that has much more vocational potential than it did in my day.

Having said that, I have to wonder what sort of a liberal arts education students get at The King’s College. Note: this isn’t King’s College, the Catholic institution in Pennsylvania, it’s a tiny (~400 students) Evangelical Christian school in New York City. Since 2010, The King’s College has been headed by Dinesh D’Souza, who to me appears to be a right-wing crackpot. D’Souza seems to have a President Obama fixation, in the same way the “birthers” do, and he makes some strange assertions. His latest is that Obama is an “anti-colonialist,” which I think says more about D’Souza than it does about Obama, because D’Souza was born in India, the last stronghold of the British Empire.

http://youtu.be/gRbqMGtvQD0

D’Souza’s claim that Obama is, as President, trying to help other countries at the expense of the United States is nonsense. The best thing to do about about guys like D’Souza is to let them talk all they want, because the more they say, the more obvious it is that they shouldn’t be taken seriously. NPR recently featured D’Souza. An edited audio interview with him is on the player, and the full interview is at this link.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2012/09/dineshd%27souza.mp3|titles=NPR interview: Dinesh D’Souza]

Follow-up: Here are a couple of related items – The Washington Post does a cost/benefit analysis of college in general, and Infoworld asks about the value of Computer Science degrees in particular.

Since the collapse of the credit markets in 2008, the PBS documentary series Frontline has been producing an outstanding, if perhaps overly dramatic, series of programs explaining the causes of the crisis and what’s been happening in the Great Recession since then. The latest is Money, Power, and Wall Street. It borrows a lot of interview video from the earlier programs, but there could have been more from the show about Brooksley Born and her warnings about the dangers of high-risk betting with borrowed money masquerading as “investing.”

Watch Money, Power and Wall Street: Part One on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.