I received in the mail today responses to my complaint about St. Elizabeth’s from Tufts Health Plan and the Division of Health Care Quality of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
It’s not terribly surprising that St. Elizabeth’s lied to Tufts and the DPH just like they lied to us. After all, once they made the decision to evade and lie rather than admitting to having made mistakes, they had to be consistent about it. What’s surprising is that they weren’t consistent about it — the story they told to Tufts, the DPH and me have different elements and are in some cases contradictory. Some interesting tidbits: (more…)
Janet Davis
Patient Relations Coordinator
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center
736 Cambridge Street
Brighton, MA 02135-2907
Dear Ms. Davis,
My wife received your response, dated February 12, to my January 26 letter to John Holiver. When coupled with the problems which prompted our letter, your appalling response is enough to convince us to never again entrust our family’s care to St. Elizabeth’s.
I will respond point-by-point to the claims made in your letter.
American Honda Motor Company, Incorporated
Honda Automobile Customer Service
Fax: (310) 783-3023
To whom it may concern:
I sent you the attached letter via fax on November 17. You did not give me the courtesy of a reply, but at least the spam directed at my wife’s email address seems to have stopped.
Unfortunately, now Honda Village is spamming MY email address, jik@kamens.brookline.ma.us, instead of my wife’s.
It is worth noting that E. Peter Mullane’s chief claim to fame is that he is one of the lawyers who defended John J. Connolly Jr., the former FBI agent who was convicted in federal court of racketeering, obstruction of justice, murder and conspiracy to commit murder and will be spending the rest of his life in prison. Nice!
I am not going to publish Mullane’s letter here, because there are all kinds of legal issues with that, and… well… Mullane is a lawyer, y’know? I will, however, publish the response I just sent him, from which you can get a pretty good idea of the claims he made in his letter. Enjoy!
In a February 10 column printed in the Boston Herald, Jonah Goldberg repeats the anti-global-warming canard that severe snowstorms are evidence against global warming. In response, I sent the following letter to the editor:
To the editor:
Jonah Goldberg’s recent suggestion that severe winter weather disproves global warning shows an alarming ignorance of basic science. In particular:
When the air is warmer, more water evaporates into it.
When there is more water in the air, it snows more.
Once you get below freezing, colder temperatures actually decrease snowfall.
In short, the simple truth is that global warming causes more snow, not less.
Of course, ideologues like Goldberg rarely let something as inconvenient as the truth stand in the way of their agenda.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Kamens
Brighton
Not only did the Herald not print my letter or any other letter or opinion piece making a similar point, they have run at least two idiotic editorial cartoons mocking the idea that more snow supports global warming theories. (more…)
I enjoyed Joe Fitzgerald’s recent satire of the pro-life movement. I laughed so hard coffee came out my nose when I read that “the only choice [the pro-choice movement] will tolerate is its own.” It was obvious that he was joking, since it’s so patently absurd to suggest that people protecting a woman’s right to choose are trying to deny her a choice.
Wait, what’s that? He was serious? Are you sure? Oh, in that case, never mind.
Fitzgerald is right that pro-choice extremists sometimes say stupid things, but I’ll take them over the extremists on the other side who think it’s God’s work to assassinate doctors performing legal medical procedures.
I reworked my recent blog entry a bit and submitted it to the Boston Herald for consideration as a letter to the editor and/or “As You Were Saying…” (which is what the Herald calls guest op-eds) column. Here’s the letter they published today:
Good citizenship taught
The school my wife and I chose for our children stands out dramatically because the students, faculty and parents are nice to each other and happy to be there. This does not happen by chance; it is the result of a consciously designed, constantly maintained culture which emphasizes respect and empathy as the community’s most precious values.
That culture could not possibly be achieved through punishment and discipline. Rather, good citizenship is an essential component of the curriculum, in every class and every grade.
And therein lies the solution to bullying. Schools cannot merely teach our children not to be bad; we must teach them to be good.
At Advent, we offer competitive compensation and benefits, treat our people well, and strive to be a good corporate citizen. Furthermore, we successfully weathered the recent economic storm, with no layoffs, and came out of it stronger than before. I love coming to work every day at Advent!
Legal Department
Jordan’s Furniture
450 Revolutionary Drive
East Taunton, MA 02718-1369
To whom it may concern:
I am writing to you about a design defect in a piece of furniture sold to me by Jordan’s Furniture. This defect is sufficiently serious and egregious as to violate both the implied warranty of merchantability and warranty of fitness for a particular purpose. After explaining the problem below, I will explain how I expect you to compensate my wife and me for it.
In November 2007, we purchased an American Leather sleeper sofa at your store in Natick, MA. Several months after the sofa arrived, the end of the zipper holding one of the cushions began to separate from the back of the sofa, so we called and scheduled a technician to come look at it.
He said it could not be repaired and the sofa would have to be replaced. The model was no longer available, and rather than replacing our defective sofa with the closest equivalent, you instead gave us a credit for the original purchase price and told us we could use it toward the purchase of a replacement. The problem was that the new model cost $420 more. In other words, you sold us a defective sofa and then expected us to pay over $400 to replace it within their warranty period.
Needless to say, we were unhappy about this, and we complained. A customer service representative agreed for Jordan’s to absorb half of the incremental cost of the replacement sofa, thus reducing our out-of-pocket cost to $210. We accepted this offer with reservations.
Fast forward to a few months ago, when the same zipper on the same cushion on our replacement sofa began to separate from the sofa in exactly the same way. Not only that, but because of the separation, the zipper comes undone when people lean back on the cushion. (more…)
My wife received a call from someone at St. Elizabeth’s at 3:15 today: “… I just wanted to let you know that we received your letter and are looking into it….”
My letter obviously didn’t make it through the mail from my house to St. Elizabeth’s in six hours, which means that they saw it on my blog. A review of my blog’s access logs shows someone at the hospital visiting the page at 1:49pm, a little over three hours after I posted it. Either someone who reads my blog knows someone at St. Elizabeth’s and forwarded a link to them, or someone at the hospital is actively monitoring the Web for postings about it.
I suppose this wouldn’t be terribly surprising — any large business that isn’t doing that nowadays is run by fools — but I do think it’s somewhat interesting.
I can’t resist the urge to point out that if St. Elizabeth’s has to choose between having enough people on staff to process test results in a timely fashion, and having someone on staff to monitor the Internet for postings about the hospital, I’d rather they choose the former than the latter.
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