Mitch’s Blog

The playing field really isn’t equal when it comes to employment and finance. Minorities still make around 70% of whites in America, and it gets worse for females. Minorities are under represented drastically in industry across the country in positions of leadership; look at housekeeping and taxis, though, and you’ll know where most minorities are.

This, to me, means that affirmative action is still needed in America. I’m not about to go into what affirmative action really is supposed to be, but if you need a refresher you can check it out by going here. All anyone really wants in America is a fair chance.

That’s why Ward Connerly and his group, oddly enough called the American Civil Rights Coalition, doesn’t get it. They’ve already gotten California, Michigan and Washington to vote against affirmative action, and this coming election there are five more states on the docket, Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma.

Connerly’s message is really simple. He says people who get benefits from affirmative action assistance are looked down upon by everyone else, and that’s not fair. He also says it takes things away from one group to help another group, and that’s not fair.

To me, it’s all about how you look at fair. On an ESPN special last month, there was a discussion of why there are so few black coaches in college football when most of the players are black, and it was stated that people tend to hire who they’re familiar and most comfortable with, and thus that means if those in charge of hiring aren’t minority, unless coerced, they’re less liable to interview, let alone hire, a minority for those positions. Connerly’s position seems to believe that the playing field is equal and everyone actually has a fair chance at every single job they wish to apply for; that’s a pipe dream,… it’s not reality.

Of course one of his big supporters happens to be a particular Supreme Court justice who actually ended up in college, then law school, because of affirmative action polities, and believes those policies have ended up hurting him because people always wonder if he’s qualified to do the job he’s been hired to do. I keep thinking people wonder if he’s qualified because he doesn’t ever ask any questions, and rarely writes his own briefs after most of the cases (yeah, I know, he’s written some; seems they all fit into one book).

Ward Connerly doesn’t get it, and if the rest of America doesn’t wake up, we will all know, come November, who else is getting it come 2009.

I don’t sleep well or enough. I’m at my computer many, many hours working and communicating with the world. I never really thought much beyond my own sleep habits; now I am.

A survey released Monday by the National Sleep Foundation found that people average six hours and 40 minutes of sleep a night on weeknights, even though they estimated they’d need roughly another 40 minutes of sleep to be at their best. Roughly one-third of those surveyed said they had fallen asleep or become very sleepy at work in the past month.

That’s not all. People are also trying to squeeze in more time for themselves and their families; the average wake up is at 5:35 a.m. and it’s followed by about two hours and 15 minutes at home before heading out to work, with the average bedtime being 10:53.

Of course, I don’t hit those figures. When I’m home, I usually get to bed by 3AM (though I’m trying to get better at that lately) and I usually wake up by 9:30. When I’m on the road, I try to get to bed by 1:30 so I can wake by 7:30. In both cases, I usually try to find time to catch a short nap just to give myself a boost.

Hopefully most of you are rested enough to work as well as possible. People on the survey said they often get drowsy at work, and sometimes fall asleep. I know that how one eats can have a negative effect also; not eating breakfast or eating too many carbs throughout the day can make you lethargic, and I’ve had to learn how to eat much differently when I’m on the road than I do when I’m working from home.

All of us have to learn how to relax, and do only as much as we can so we can still get our full rest. We all don’t need the same amount of sleep, but it’s still recommended that we try to get 8 hours. Heck, when is the last time I actually slept 8 hours? I’ll have to ask my wife.

Yes, you read that headline correctly. In a MSNBC news story yesterday titled “Black Pups Face Doggie Discrimination”, statistics seem to indicate that it’s hard to move black dogs out of shelters, no matter the age. One worker was quoted as saying “They’re the hardest to adopt out, they’re in the shelters the longest and therefore, they’re most likely to be euthanized if nothing happens.”

I don’t have a dog now, but when I was a kid we had a dog, a Springer Spaniel, who was mainly black with a white belly and white feet, and I just loved that dog. I’ve never thought of people turning away from animals because of their color; I could always understand choice of breed because there are some types of dogs I don’t like myself. Still, as much as this story seems kind of shocking, I don’t know why I’m not more surprised to read it than I am. It’s possible that cynicism has kicked in, but I hope not.

Of course I’m not the only one talking about it, as Stereohyped proves. I think this story is going to get a lot more press before it’s finally retired.

First, the latest TTM Consulting Newsletter, Privacy? Not Any More, is now available.

I’ve been reading a lot of things lately about customer service and computers, and I was drawn to a story about Comp USA and how they had so many serious customer problems that it’s probably what led to the company pretty much closing almost all its stores in the United States. I hate to be one to jump on the bandwagon, but as much as I loved the design of the store I had plenty of complaints about some of their customer service issues.

It’s not that people were rude, or that some of them didn’t know what they were talking about. The first issue was that you could never find anyone to talk to when you had questions. You had to pretty much always go to the customer service desk to find someone to ask a question of, and rarely did that person know how to respond to your question, and rarely did someone come from behind the counter to walk with you to the area to try to help you out.

The second issue was questions about the viability of some of their products. Not that the names weren’t valid, but what they were selling you might not have been new, or might not have been what you thought you were purchasing.

The third issue was service. I purchased one of their 3 year maintenance plans, which was pretty much a waste of my money when the local stores all closed up, and I had them build a computer with my selecting all the components. In essence the computer I put together was almost $3,000, including the professional edition of Windows XP, yet I ended up taking it back to them six times, and it still doesn’t work properly.

Pretty much after my computer issues I had stopped going, unless I needed something on an emergency basis while I was out of town. One time it was a lifesaver; another time,… well, let’s just say that my complaint ended up with the state attorney general’s office and leave it at that.

At the present time I have another blog where I talk about marketing and advertise certain products. On one of them, I’ve been receiving a few negative comments about the products and the customer service problems these buyers have been having. Now I’m going to do my own investigation, because customer service is a big issue with me, if you’ve been a long time reader of my blog. Bad customer service is the one thing I can’t tolerate, and I won’t be associated for long with anyone who makes me, or others, feel bad because of this issue.

There is no product in the world worth putting up with being treated as though you don’t really matter.

On Kevin Eikenberry’s blog, he recently had a post titled If You had Just Six Words. The premise is that you can only use six words to describe six brief statements about yourself or your beliefs, and its purpose is to help you clarify your thoughts in a more succinct manner.

Instead of commenting on his blog, I figured I’d share it here, link back to his blog, and give my responses to the six items here. Please check his blog out, then my answers might make more sense:

Try it yourself; you can post it here, on Kevin’s blog, or elsewhere, but give it a shot.

The general public is now starting to hear about something that the healthcare community has been freaking out about for awhile now. We use the term “RAC Audits”; to the uninitiated, that stands for “recovery audit contractors”.

Their basic purpose is to go into hospitals and other types of healthcare facilities and determine if Medicare overpaid for procedures, or see if they agree with medical determination of diagnoses and treatments. Thus far, in three states, these audits have recovered more than $300 million dollars in three years, which is why it’s about to expand across the country; this has become a very lucrative business moreso than the audits the OIG performed on hospitals looking for fraud.

As usual, I see two sides of this issue, and therefore I have two different opinions on this. On the one hand, billing errors do happen, and there is billing fraud. There’s less fraud than errors, but the fear of being called on fraudulent billing is scary enough. However, being paid money that you’re not supposed to be getting and being made to give it back sounds fair on the surface. At least Medicare, to its credit, will sometimes go the other way; if they see they should have paid more money, they’ll pay it. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to occur as often, obviously judged by how much money has been recovered.

On the other hand, going back and reviewing medical records and determining that a physician could have done something different is another matter. Suddenly it comes down to interpretation, and doctors performing legitimate medical procedures being told on the back end that what they did, and how the diagnoses were coded based on what the physicians determined, opens up a Pandora’s box that just isn’t fair. The money being taken back doesn’t hurt the doctors; it hurts the hospitals. Medical records people are trained to code exactly what’s in the record, and inpatient claims are paid based on diagnosis code. Small changes of interpretation can affect hospital reimbursement drastically, and, since more hospitals are losing money than making money, these kinds of audits are going to end up putting patients at risk.

Hospitals can challenge legally, but financially, it’s not feasible most of the time. If a hospital fights these rulings it will cost a lot of money in legal fees, and they may lose anyway. As it pertains to fraud audits, if a hospital loses they have to pay 3 times the initial claim by the auditors; I haven’t heard what the figure is for these audits, but I will at some point. Either way, it’s hard to fight the government, or the government’s representatives, because they always have more money. Hospitals have appealed 11% of the claims against them; they’ve only won 5% on the back end.

I hope you can see the dilemma. Since most hospitals have a small positive budget margin, being hit with a large judgment could put good healthcare at risk. The story I read talked about a rehabilitation hospital that was hit with a $2.9 million dollar judgment and had to look for a buyer or close their doors. I’ve heard of hospitals hit with judgments of over $10 million dollars; that will take a chunk out of anyone. And Medicare doesn’t have to wait for you to pay them back; they just won’t pay you anything until they have all their money, so hospitals have no choice, even if they appeal. Still, if there are errors as it pertains to billing in general, I don’t have a big problem with it; I do have problems with coming in and changing diagnoses that may or may not be a judgment call. In my mind, that’s still what the OIG (Office of the Inspector General) is for.

Very short post today. A friend of mine sent me this link to a clip that was put together from footage from the movie The Secret. It’s short, just over 2 minutes, but it’s nice, and it might make you feel good. At least it made me feel good.

Tonight I went with my wife to a financial planner. She’s been talking about getting advice on a retirement plan for herself, and who am I to stand in the way, right? I have a financial planner, though, and didn’t want to go, but she kept telling me this guy was insisting that I show up for some reason I couldn’t understand. She told him I had someone, but I guess he wouldn’t see her without me there; I’m a good husband.

So I go, and it turns out that he’s more than just a financial planner. In essence, he does business planning, retirement planning, etc. Turns out that when he does this type of thing, he doesn’t just do it for one party, but for both parties. And, even if I decided I didn’t want any part of it, if my wife said she did then he’d still need access to every single piece of financial information we had, otherwise he couldn’t properly do his job.

Talk about an ambush! I don’t think my wife set me up, but I felt ambushed nonetheless. I usually have one rule when it comes to certain things: if we have some sort of personal relationship, then I usually won’t use you for things where I have to give up personal information. In this case I already knew the guy. We met years ago when we were both in the same organization, and I’d actually been to his house way back then also when he had made an offer to that organization to help anyone who completed a survey with ideas for their marketing, and I was the only person who did the survey. The guy lives near me, and I’ve seen him at the grocery store; that’s usually just a bit too close for comfort from where I’m sitting.

So yes, I felt ambushed, and my first reaction was to kind of pull back and out. I went to sit on the couch, but I was still hearing everything that was going on. At some point, my mind realized that my wife was going to go through this thing anyway, and all my financial information was going to be his, and as much as I might not like it, maybe there was a way I could embrace it. So I asked him about it, and he said that whether I was a full participant in it or not, he was actually representing the family moreso than just my wife, whether he shared with just her or with both of us, depending on whether I came back with her or not. Heck!

So, I guess I’m going to be a client, and I’m not sure at this juncture how reluctant or willing I am. I still keep my true financial advisor, a guy who’s made me almost 40% on my initial investment since I handed him a check just under 18 months ago, and I still keep my accountant. This guy supposedly enhances it all for us, especially if my wife decides to do more with her budding enterprise or other enterprises along the way. I’m not sure how open I am to sharing every dollar I spend with someone else, since I’ve always done my own budgeting, and actually do budgeting for others, but we’ll see. I can end it at any time, no questions asked; check back in about six months when I’ll have information one way or another to share.

I’m going to be writing my next newsletter on privacy, and I wanted to mention something about it now, ahead of time.

In essence, there is no such thing as privacy anymore, especially as it pertains to work. More and more companies are penalizing employees for behavior outside of work, and that’s scary. A friend of mine mentioned that there are many things he doesn’t do on Facebook because his employers have access to his profile, and he can’t take any chances in what they might do to him if they saw something inappropriate there. I work for myself, and kind of understand that type of thinking, though my profile is limited to certain people, but I also feel that some things aren’t appropriate being attached to me on that site.

No one gets a free pass anymore on what they say or what they do. In many cases I think it’s fair; no one should be allowed to say a bunch of hateful things about a group of people and still feel they can work with those people as if nothing had happened. And if others are mad at them for those beliefs and thoughts, well, those are the consequences for bad behavior. In some cases I don’t think it’s fair; just because you decide you want to smoke outside of work in a place where smoking is allowed, even inside your home, shouldn’t give any employer the right to determine that you’re not of enough quality to work for them, even if they pay for your insurance.

Basically, be prepared folks; cameras are going up everywhere, you can find almost anything about anyone in the internet, and listening devices are cheap. Be on your guard, and your best behavior, especially if you’re dependent upon someone else for your money.