John Holiver, President
St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center
736 Cambridge Street
Brighton, MA 02135
Dear Mr. Holiver,
My wife, Andrea Kamens, was treated in your emergency room (ER) early in the morning on Sunday, January 17.
The doctor who treated her told her to seek follow-up care with her primary care physician (PCP), Dr. Cathleen London. He said he would call Dr. London that day, but my wife should wait until Tuesday to contact her, because by then all the test results would be available in my wife’s electronic record, where Dr. London would be able to access them.
Not only did the ER doctor not call Dr. London on Sunday as promised, he never called her at all.
Not only were my wife’s test results not available by Tuesday as promised, they were not available until January 26, nine days after my wife’s ER visit.
Last November, I posted on my blog a copy of a letter which I faxed to Congressman Robert Wexler, in which I chastised him for giving my email address (which I gave him when I made a donation to his campaign, so that he could send me a receipt) to another politician’s campaign and demanded that he remove my address from all lists and databases under his control.
A friend, Michael Burstein, commented on that blog entry, “Wexler is a good guy, so I can’t I imagine that he and his staff won’t take steps to fix this. Let us know once he has.”
Alas, my friend was incorrect. I received no response from Wexler or anyone on his staff, and today, I received another piece of spam at the email address I had given to Wexler, from the campaign of yet another politician, Ted Deutch. Although the spam came from “campaign@tedforcongress.com”, the letter in it was signed by Congressman Wexler, making it all the more clear that he provided the mailing list to Deutch.
Many are saying that one of the reasons why the Democrats lost yesterday’s special election in Massachusetts is because they are acting like elitist snobs. I’m not fan of the Republicans and I voted for Coakley yesterday, but I can absolutely understand why people feel that way. I think there’s a lot of truth to it, and I think that this unrepentant spamming from Wexler is a symptom of it.
Congressman Wexler: What you have to say to me is not so important that you get to say it when I’ve told you to leave me alone. Your fellow Democratic politicians are not so critical to the future of this country that you get to share my email address with them when I’ve never given you permission and indeed asked you not to. You are not so high and mighty that you get to ignore my letters to you with impunity. You, sir, have lost my trust, and you will not soon regain it.
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has a convoluted(*) unemployment insurance system, under which employers are required to make various quarterly and annual filings and quarterly payments involving at least two different state agencies.
This system is administered by the Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA), who decided to replace their old, paper-based system with a Web-based system called QUEST (“Quality Unemployment System Transformation”). The DUA promised QUEST would bring countless improvements: one-stop shopping, filings for all agencies in one place, faster filings, less wasted paper, reduced printing and postage costs, reduced data entry costs, no more data transcription errors, etc., etc. You’ve no doubt heard it all before.
QUEST went live at the beginning of 2010. As of the go-live date, the usage of QUEST for all employer unemployment insurance transactions was mandatory; paper filings were no longer permitted. I.e., the DUA went straight from paper filings only to on-line filings only, with no transition period or overlap.(**)
It would be an understatement to say that the QUEST go-live is not going well; in fact, it is a disaster. (more…)
I’ve just sent the following letter, with minor variations, to Sen. Kerry, Rep. Capuano, State Sen. Tolman, State Rep. Honan, and Martha Coakley (who will almost certainly soon be Sen. Coakley). If you’re as fed up as I am with this state of affairs (the incident described below is not the first time we’ve been charged a large ER copayment for something which really, truly, required an ER visit), please contact your elected representatives and ask them to do something about it.
Dear Senator Kerry,
Recently, my wife was woken in the middle of the night by persistent abdominal pain so intense (she described it as much worse than natural childbirth) that it caused her to vomit and prevented her from sitting up. Of course, I drove her straight to the emergency room of our local hospital.
Thirteen hours later, she was diagnosed with a kidney stone and discharged. This diagnosis was confirmed by her primary care physician in a followup visit several days later. Both the ER staff and my wife’s PCP confirmed that going to the ER was both necessary and appropriate.
Several days later, I received a bill from the hospital for the $100 ER copayment required by my insurance company. Herein lies the crux of the issue about which I am writing.
Congressman Robert Wexler
2241 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Fax: (202) 225-5974
Dear Congressman Wexler,
In May 2008, a letter from you to one of your supporters was forwarded to the Jews for Obama listserv with the introduction, “As you all know, Congressman Wexler has been a strong Obama supporter and advisor to the campaign. Please help him in his re-election bid. Thanks.”
In response, I sent a donation to your campaign, one which I couldn’t really afford given how much I had already spent to help Obama.
When I donated to you, I specified a unique email address, [elided]. Today I received an email message to that address from “Marcy Winograd for Congress”. Since the only time I’ve ever given out that email address to anyone is when I donated to your campaign, the only way Winograd’s campaign could have gotten the address is from you. Shame on you.
Long-time readers of my blog know that I have been trying, for almost two years, to eliminate junk mail — the paper kind — from my mailbox. I’ve registered everyone in my family with the DMA’s MPS, tried out various Web sites that purport to help you stop junk mail, and most time-consuming of all, contacted every single company or organization sending me junk mail and asked them to stop.
I am doing this for three reasons:
Reduce the time I waste dealing with junk mail.
Reduce damage to the environment caused by the production and transportation of mail that I don’t want or need.
Reduce the expense to charities I support of sending me solicitations that won’t make me donate to them more or more often.
There is, however, one category of junk mailers that has been distinctly resistant to my efforts — Boston-area real-estate agents.
We receive a regular stream of postcards, refrigerator magnets, “free sale consultation” offers, etc. from area agents. They are usually addressed to us by name “or current resident,” so the agents are clearly getting a database from somewhere, but they’re not filtering us out based on our MPS registration, so they’re clearly not typical bulk mailers.
Furthermore, the proportion of agents who respond with “Sorry, I can’t do that” when I ask them to stop writing to me is much higher than that of any other category of mailers. This prompted me to wonder for quite a while what exactly is going on, until one of the agents actually clued me in. I’ll explain by way of an example.
It has been painful to watch the avalanche of flawed statistics and discredited urban legends wielded by opponents of a primary enforcement seat-belt law in their foolhardy efforts to stop a law which would undeniably save lives.
Jonah Goldberg informs us that since there are states with higher traffic fatality rates that have primary enforcement laws, such laws must be useless. His simplistic analysis ignores the prime directive of statistical research, i.e., that statistical variations between two samples are only relevant if all other factors have been taken into account. Study after study that did take such factors into account have proved that primary enforcement dramatically increases seat-belt use and that increased seat-belt use dramatically decreases accident injury and fatality rates.
A recent letter writer claimed that since millions of people who don’t wear seatbelts have not been killed in accidents, seatbelts don’t save lives. It would make just as much sense to say that since people who don’t play Russian roulette don’t shoot themselves in the head, Russian roulette isn’t dangerous.
That same letter writer trotted out the ridiculous myth that seatbelts can trap passengers in vehicles that are submerged or on fire. The fact is that, as documented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, virtually every study ever conducted indicates that lap and shoulder belts cut the risk of serious or fatal injury by 40 to 55%.
While the Herald may have a journalistic obligation to present both sides of every story, I do not think that obligation extends to printing absurdities and lies.
Councilor Michael Flaherty’s idea to slash the city’s motor pool by having workers ride the T is a brilliant strategy for doubling the number of employees on the payroll. How else does he expect to maintain the same level of productivity when workers are forced to spend half the day waiting for trains and buses that run infrequently and arrive late, if at all?
Is Flaherty trying to save the city money or earn points with the unions by creating jobs for their members?
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