Dynamic Ridesharing Pt 3

I had gathered enough information...statistics about public transport and congestion costs in L.A., and price quotes from the guy at the tracking company, to support my great idea. I decided to find an authority to share it with. But what are people who know about these things called? I surfed around until I found my answer: Urban Planners. I wrote a letter to a professor in urban planning at UCLA...no response. I read through the faculty profiles at USC and tried again, after all, someone must realize this was THE BEST IDEA EVER.

This time I got a reply:

Your idea is called dynamic carpooling, or "on the fly" carpooling. The technology exists and in theory such a system could be established. The problem is human behavior and instutions -- people are unlikely to share rides with other they don't know (personal safety, driver behavior); there are huge liability problems; the added inconvenience is generally not worth the dollar savings.

That's sad to hear...but I couldn't really believe it. Happy to hear that my idea, although not original, had a name, I decided to see if anyone had tried it...after all, what would an expert in the area know anyway?

Dynamic Ridesharing Pt 2

I told friends about my idea, but few seemed to see its brilliance.

"What if you get in a car with a psycho person, or a bad driver?" they asked.
"Well, obviously you'd have to have police records and driving records...and you're being tracked on GPS, so there would be an alert if someone started to drive you someplace different from the original destination...plus, you're in the middle of L.A. traffic, it's not like you're on a lonely road somewhere."
"Yeah, well, what if you leave your car at home, and then you get someplace and there's no one to take you back?"
"I think at first there would be courtesy cars--maybe contracted with a cab service, to insure that wouldn't happen."
"Huh. What if someone smelled bad?"
"Well, I guess that might happen once or twice. But you give feedback after each transaction, like on eBay, I think smelly people would get comments and either freshen up or their ratings would drop--think of how many different people you meet who might be cool!"
"Yeaahhh...I don't know if I would do it."

I don't get it. These are people who compost and recycle their light-bulbs, who worry about global warming and care about people in third world countries. How can we be so fervent and deep in our causes and so shallow in our everyday interactions? Whatever.

Just out of curiosity, I googled a place that does tracking for entities like trucking companies, the San Diego city utilities etc, and talked to him. He said, “Sure, you could outfit each car with a GPS and a Mobile Data Terminal (MDT) that would connect to a database that would associate with a webpage accessible with a PDA.” He said they would have to customize a system, but seemed confident that such a system could handle a hundred thousand drivers. "Have you sent this idea of Al Gore?" he asked, "Someone should give you a really big grant to try this."
"Not quite yet," I replied modestly, but doing the high-five dance inside, finally, someone realized this was THE BEST IDEA EVER.

I couldn't believe no one else had ever thought of it.

Dynamic Ridesharing Pt 1

My Dream:
I walk out of my apartment in Palms and don’t get in my car to go to the dentist’s office. Instead, as I walk toward Sepulveda and Venice Avenues, I pulls out my PDA and enter my location and the address of my destination in Sherman Oaks.
At the same time, Ginger Tompkins, a woman I’ve never met, is driving to meet friends in Sherman Oaks. She enters her destination into a monitor in her car. As she drives up Venice Blvd., her GPS coordinates are transmitted to a database and a navigation system calculates her route. A moment later, I receive notification of a match. Ginger pulls up at a designated pick-up point, I hop in, and moments later we are heading for the freeway. Since she has a passenger, Ginger slides into the HOV lane, so we get there fast, and I don’t even have to find parking!
As we say goodbye, rideshare credits are automatically debited from my account and credited to Ginger’s. As I wait for the dentist, I receive a reminder message to rate the transaction. I check the box and enter, “Good experience.”


Ever since I rode in a Melbourne cab, and realized that the entire fleet was tracked at a central location by GPS, I've been thinking about possible ways that might apply to Los Angeles, where every time I drive anywhere, I'm left thinking, "How is it possible that no matter where I go, or when I go there, all these people are going there too?" And wondering why the heck we each have to be going the same place all alone, each surrounded by our own two thousand pounds of gas consuming, pollution emitting metal, plastic and glass?

Then, the other day, waiting for my phone ot be repaired at the sprint store, I saw a brochure for phones with GPS systems...you can look at a map on your screen and see little dots where all your friends are. This was it! Surely by combining these technologies, a real-time rideshare system could be right around the corner...if only someone would think of it!

One More Decision to Make in the Future

Here's an interesting article from the L.A. Times about individual health care coverage after cancer.
For all of my three years working in Chicago, and three of my six years in L.A., I was a free-lance contractor. Among other things, this meant I was responsible for my own retirement plans and insurance. Then Paul and I got married and moved to Australia, I had his company insurance and have had student insurance since then. When, after this long hiatus, I return to L.A. in the spring, I will be four and a half years out from my cancer diagnoses, and, as discussed in the article, insurance will be a real consideration...best bets if I decide insurance is a priority: corporate jobs, government jobs, or my new front-running idea...more school!

Here's a true confession though--any insurance company will catch a break with me in any case, because if I were diagnosed again, I'm pretty sure they won't pay for the alternative health clinic in Mexico where I plan to go.

A Little Caught Up in the Rest of My Life

Trying to do a little planning ahead--like when and how and where we're going to move after graduating in the spring, and how we're going to afford it. And then, jobs? More school? No jobs? Plans need to be made, but it's not the most pleasant mental place for me. A lot of the future is contingent on a producing certain amount of creative output in the next few months, but when I'm anxious about the future, its difficult to be creative in the present. So I've been trying to work with that a bit today. I have a feeling I will have to bump up my meditation time for the next few months to keep on an even keel emotionally.

Despite this, there are quite a few exciting things to look forward to when I'm feeling not-neurotic about them. In in early January I'm going to the Key West Literary Seminar. Because the theme is "New Voices," they were very generous with financial support, enabling me to go to my first of event of this type. I'll be in this workshop with Trevor Corson. I've read the book we are supposed to read in preparation, but have not even begun the article I need to write...in fact I don't even know what to write about, but I'm sure as the moment approaches I will come up with something!

The next week I'm going to AWP, where I'm moderating a panel called "Why Ballet is Good for Football Players: How Screenwriting Informs Fiction and Poetry Writing" (we're on the schedule here).

After the conference, I will stay the weekend to visit my half-brother, his wife and their new baby, and then take a bus upstate to visit my friend Christa and her new husband. It's a small town I think, and she promises hikes and a fireplace...I'm very much looking forward to this!

Then in February, I will be the closest to unemployed I have been for a while, and it will be time to get down and dirty for the remaining months of spring, and to see what it might be like to be a "real" writer--of the sort who just gets up and writes and not much else. Right now I have this fall-back, when I consider the day, I think, "Hmm, I didn't write much, but I did go to work, and class, and got my homework done." No more. There will be just one criterion for a successful day. Easier, but harder.

There are some balls in the air for later, but I'll save these, and try to do what's first, first.

Why It’s Hard to Trust—Part 2, My Personal Healthcare Shopper

As the lady in billing said, "You're paying your insurance company to do the shopping." But when I asked for price breakdowns from various vendors, my Aetna representative declined to do the research and recommended that I go to the Aetna Navigator website in order to see “a rough estimate for the cost of this procedure.” She said that, “Navigator calculates the cost based on historical claims information adjusted to take into account health care cost inflation,”

So what kind of numbers did Aetna Navigator come up with for me? It estimates that for a colonoscopy I will pay:
In Network: $1384. That is my 20%, meaning that they pay the remaining 80%, $5536, for a grand total of $6920. Out-of-Network the total cost is estimated to be even higher, assumedly for lack of their negotiating skills, at $7205.

Aetna says, seven thousand dollars for a colonoscopy…Bob, let’s see what our vendors had to say about that when I called and quizzed them:

Digestive Disease Clinic (Out of Network): Doctor, $831 + Facility (everything included), $970 = Total Cost, $1801. (I pay $720, they pay $1081.)

G.I. Associates (In negotiations to be in Network) Doctor, $550 + Facility, $860 = Total Cost, $1410. (My cost either $282 or $564, theirs $1128 or $846.)

Gastroenterology Associates Sarasota (In Network): Doctor, $600+ Facility, $1300-$2400+Anethesiologist, $455-$585 + Total Cost = $2355-$3585. (My cost $417-$717, theirs $1884-$2868)

So, while I am personally happy that I’m not paying over a thousand dollars for a $7000 procedure, I have a feeling we must all be paying for these kinds of gross inaccuracies in ways I don’t fully understand. There is a chance that Aetna’s estimates are a true accounting of the costs of doing a procedure at the hospital but NO ONE, either service provider or insurance provider volunteered the price differences until I explicitly asked. So not only is no-one looking out for my (the individual’s) pocket-book, no one seems to be bargain hunting at the insurance company either.

If a quote of $7000 is really coming from historical charges, that means my Aetna has paid at least this much in the past. To whom? And if a for-profit company is coming up with these numbers, what about government’s numbers?. Where are they getting them? Hopefully not from the insurance companies that don’t know their procedure codes or their negotiated rates.

I don’t have enough information to have a stance on things like universal healthcare, but I wonder if the people who make the decisions do either. All I know is that if Aetna gave me $7205 for one colonoscopy today, I could shop around and use the same funds to provide 5 people with the same service at $1410, or 4 at $1801, or even 2 at $3585.

Hello, Personal Healthcare Shopper? I’ve got my eye on you!

Why it’s Hard to Trust Anyone Associated with Medical Costs—Part 1

It’s that time of year again, when I get to arrange for a tests to make sure I am still cancer-free. One of these is a colonoscopy. Our school’s insurance provider has changed (again) and we now have Aetna (again). My current G.I. (that’s gastro-intestinal I think) doctor is not in my network. If I use an in-network provider, I pay 20% and Aetna pays 80%, and with an out-of-network provider, I pay 40% and Aetna pays 60%. Last time my doctor fell out of my network, I called and found that the in-network provider only worked out of the hospital (as opposed to a private clinic). I tried to compare costs by calling the hospital for a price, but it was fairly impossible. They have a negotiated rate with my provider and they don’t know what it is, and they don’t know how many band-aids or needles or whatever will be used they told me. But the cost for the bed alone made me conclude that it seemed safer, and possibly cheaper, and certainly more predictable to just pay more at an out-of-network provider who seemed to know what they charged.

This year, I decided ask Aetna directly, figuring THEY would know what their negotiated prices were. I talked to our insurance person at the health center who made the request. The response from Aetna was this:

Generally the hospital or provider will not provide an estimate for the cost of a procedure without having more information like a procedure code or the number of necessary visits.
This student can log on to Aetna Navigator to get a estimate for the cost of a colonoscopy in the provider's area. Please advise the following steps:
0. Enter username/password
0. Blah blah blah

Aetna Navigator will deliver a rough estimate for the cost of this procedure. Navigator calculates the cost based on historical claims information adjusted to take into account health care cost inflation, in the calculation of the estimated costs.

In other words, she was saying, she didn’t feel like trying at all—Those codes are in a book published by the American Medical Association. I could probably google them for her--But here’s the bigger question: This is the insurance company—do they really not have access to the procedure codes or the money they have spent at various venders (which shouldn’t even differ that much because they should have a negotiated price)? Where are all their past claim invoices, do they not have numbers and prices on them? Basically this woman was telling me that THE INSURANCE COMPANY DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE PAYING.

In the end, I called around myself, and although I was able to get numbers, I was assured at two places that the negotiated rate was probably lower, but that THE SERVICE PROVIDERS DID NOT KNOW WHAT THESE RATES WERE, they just let the insurance company tell them. In one case, since I was talking to the woman in the billing office, I did think to ask if perhaps, they have done the procedure before (it is a very common procedure---probably half their business I’m guessing), that perhaps they have issued invoices or received checks from the insurance company that she could look at?

She said it was probably possible, but that such things were hidden deep inside the entrails of the computer and were very hard to get to—she would probably need help to gain access. But she suggested I call the insurance company because “they should have those negotiated rates” and after all, “you’re paying them to do the shopping.”

Indeed I am.

T P Smackdown

So tonight as I walked into Miller's Alehouse to meet a friend I was talking to Paul on the phone. "We need to get toilet paper," he said. I knew this, I had said the same thing to him this morning, hoping he would go buy some during the day. I had no desire to go out of my way and make a stop when it was 35 degrees outside at 11pm, so on my way out of Miller's, I stopped in the restroom and helped myself to several yards of two-ply.

Upon my arrival home, Paul asked, "Did you get toilet paper?"

"Sure," I replied and proudly pulled my wadded stash from my purse.
"No!" he shouted, "That will not do?"
"Why not?"
"Because we are not BARBARIANS!"
"What's wrong? It's not used."
"Oh man," he said, pulling on his jacket. "Now I've got to go get some."
"Can you pick up some.."
"No!"
"How 'bout if I go too?"
"Yeah, okay."

When we got home from the grocery store I went upstairs to the bathroom.
We totally had enough paper on the roll to last 'til tomorrow.

Cut Off

When I started my job at the Florida Department of Education, I was blocked from both my school email and my hotmail accounts, but I could access my gmail, probably because it was linked to the google search engine. Times have changed, and I arrived today to find that gmail, too, has been blocked. Farewell, oh conduit to the outside world!

So far though, they haven't blocked the blogger!

My Teeth Hurt

Paul bought the movie Hard Candy, so I watched it before bed last night, and immediately wished I hadn't. Because it was plotted, and because none of what could have been graphic is shown on screen, it is not torture "porn," but it comes from that kind of place I think. There is something deep-rooted in these situations--on one hand the fear of being commandeered by someone who is not controllable, predictable, or swayed by the rules of society--is that titillating in someway perhaps? Maybe the surge of emotion and adrenaline alone is enough to make being horrified pleasurable. And on the other hand, there is the idea of torturing someone else. And is the fact that the someone else is guilty of some crime part of this, or something that we add to make the whole idea palatable to ourselves and others? I don't know. But at the end of Hard Candy (spoiler alert), we get the satisfaction at the end of knowing the guy that's she's tortured is a pedophile, possible accessory to murder, so we feel in some way excused for reveling in the hour and a half of cruelty, because it was justice being meted out.

With a substitution of characters, the situation reminded me of reading the play Death and the Maiden, where a woman is confronted with a man she believes tortured her during the war, and also Extremeties.

Since I've been at the film school, with each year's class, apart from the straight up horror films, there is always someone who does a film where someone who has transgressed in someway is held in the basement while the man of the house conducts some kind of interrogation.

I can't say what the attraction is...I can guess that it is a catharsis of some anger, or the fantasy of taking control and punishing people who have made us feel out of control and hurt us. And I can't say why these films really appeal to some people--the numbers who have turned out in droves for each Saw film--and not to me. I have a small list of films I have seen that hardly approach that level of violence--Seven, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and now possiblyHard Candy--yet make me sad and queasy years after viewing them. Am I repressing some core part of myself that would revel in this? Or am I just a wimp--one of the first to go if we ever have to survive in a post-apocolyptic world populated by some mutated race of torture fiends?

How do you feel about these films? Feel free to comment!

Unmotivated

That's how I'm feeling at the moment. I took the evening off from my usual job of observing readers and helping out my boss with recording for the English Department Website, but now I dont' know what to do. There are many things I could or should do, but I don't want to waste the time, and what if I chose filing papers and then decide I should have gone to the movies? What if I go to the movies and realize I should have read a book, or washed some dishes? It's a fine line between unmotivated and paralyzed.

Ashes to Ashes, Pulp to Pulp

Hi Barrington

Hope all is well!

We still have 2455 copies of Paul Eats in stock here & need to tidy the stock up now.

We are still selling a few copies so can keep 100 or so to sell through.

With the other 2350 copies we can either:

Send to any address you care to nominate (cost about $100 anywhere in Australia)
Pulp (I would need to confirm exact cost but approx $50 total)
Put into storage at $4 per pallet per week

No great rush but I would like to get the stock moved by Xmas if possible.

Best regards,

Andrew ----
Publishing & Marketing Manager
Woodslane

In October of 2005 we printed 5000 copies because of the price break at that number--and sold about half. Not too shabby. Not literature, I know, but I think I will always be proud of my first foray into the world of authorship and publishing. R.I.P. Paul Eats:Perth.

Paul's a Good Boy!

For the second year in a row, he is one of the 10 finalists for the Coca Cola Refreshing Filmmaker Award. His short film (not a commercial!), entitled, "The Working Girl" is still available on the website. Pre-production for his 2008 effort is now underway...details and pleas for votes to come!