Post 2.0

This is one of those pics that needs the right caption and a spot on the wall at work.
Suggestions?If you don't like watching really fast production cars competing against each other on a track and then a road course then you won't be interested in this brief video from Edmunds. But if you're ever in the market for a car, new or used, Edmunds.com is indispensable. Among other things it will tell you what incentives the dealer gets from the manufacturer, and that tells you how much bargaining room you have on the MSRP. The site also has objective and helpful reviews on new and recent model cars.

The Olympics are still five weeks away but there's already a national favorite. Dara Torres is a 41 - yes, that's right, 41 years old - swimmer who just qualified in the 100 meter free style. She didn't just qualify, she finished first. This will be her fifth Olympics and the first one was 24 years ago. Which means she beat swimmers who weren't born the first time she qualified. You gotta catch this lady when the time comes. I don't care if she finishes dead last in China, she's a story.

You may remember the little incident I had on a flight to Seattle last December. Hospitals and doctors in Las Vegas are out of our network so we wondered what would be covered by our insurance. After about the third bill from the ER doctor and a call to the insurance company that brought bad news we paid the bill ourselves. Weeks later we got a letter from the insurance company that said they would pay that bill after all.
You probably won't be surprised to learn that medical corporations (nobody pays their doctor anymore) are a lot better at bugging you for money than they are at sending back your money. It took them a couple of days to process the check we sent to them, but we've been told it takes a month for them to process our refund after they receive funds from our insurance company.
Meanwhile, my primary care dr. (again, in truth it's the medical corp. he works for) sent us an odd statement last week. It showed an amount due, but also that it had been paid. Since we hadn't paid it Pam called to ask what the deal was. They told her we had a balance with them because they also had billed us for charges the insurance company said they didn't cover but then paid. So rather than refund our money back to us they decided to keep it, and just use it to pay any future charges we incurred. Huh??
No! Send it back to us!
You may be thinking that the real problem in all of this is our insurance company that first tells us they won't pay, and then does. True. But we'd sooner get somewhere with the Federal Govt. than penetrate the inner workings of an insurance company.
What bothers me is the way these two medical corps. feel free to hold our money for us. Maybe that shouldn't surprise me.
The upside to this is that these two medical checks should arrive about the same time as our tax incentive check. Between them we'll have enough to send it all back to the IRS for our next quarterly.