LeBron, Best Places & Why The Healthcare Rush?

Not quite the dog days of summer yet -- those pop up in August -- but there are some interesting stories making the rounds beyond the Heaven Can Wait saga and attacks in Firestone Park.

The celebrity-watching site TMZ.com is at it again, this time with promises of a video coming later today that will be sure to have Akron watching.

The website that broke the Michael Jackson story -- and seems to continue to "own" the latest revelations, giving traditional media bigwigs fits -- says it has landed what we were led to believe didn't exist.

Video of LeBron James getting dunked on at his basketball camp.

By now you should know the story: LeBron holds a camp for up-and-coming players, and Jordan Crawford of Xavier University does the unthinkable during the LeBron James Skills Academy and slams one home over LBJ. Nike reps, thinking as fast as their shoes can carry then, proceed to scour the arena for anyone with video and point out this isn't acceptable and confiscate the video.

One apparently got away.

It isn't posted yet; TMZ's too smart for that, knowing this is a golden opportunity to showcase their TV show to get the first taste of the video with all the traffic to the web site to follow. Smart marketing...especially with advance notice it'll be posted after 9:45 p.m. tonight.

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Seen the latest edition of Money Magazine featuring a list of the 100 Best Places to Live -- Small Towns version? Not really surprising to note Ohio towns didn't make the top ten, we've become accustomed to getting dissed. But what is interesting is noting how well Ohio communities placed among the towns cracking the top 100.

Westerville (15), Highland Heights (18), Solon (23), Twinsburg (30), Medina (40), Springboro (41) placed well. In fact, Medina was one of two small towns with "A" ratings in all but one category (the other was Plymouth Township, Michigan) ranging from housing affordability, safety, education and leisure/arts.

Guess what's dragging down the top performers?

The economy. Medina earned a C, the same as the other near-perfect. Otherwise northeast Ohio looks like the best location in the nation with Solon, Twinsburg and Highland Heights joining Medina to stake their claim to four of the top 40 rankings.

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Tonight President Obama holds a news conference where the dominant questioning is likely to be over health care. No wonder, since the White House determines when it holds news conferences and right now that's all Washington is talking about. Tomorrow, Mr. Obama brings the health care road show to Shaker Heights for a Town Hall meeting.

The debate now seems to be over which version making its way through Congress is the best, what parts are the worst, and how much/who gets hurt/how long we wait in line for care on the minds of the little people who wind up paying for all this. There is another question, however.

Why the rush to get this done in the next couple weeks?

We've seen just how well managed going trillions of dollars in debt has been so far with the bailouts/recovery many members of Congress approved without reading. If health care truly impacts one-sixth of the economy, isn't this time to keep the heat on public debate without an artificial political deadline?

The Democrats running Congress seem to forget the lesson the Republicans ignored in the rush to war: talk may be cheap, but real debate and actual deliberation is the cornerstone of America's legislative process. It's designed to be clunky and time-consuming because more than 130 years ago a group of rebellious wise dudes decided the wisdom of bringing diverse opinion together and forcing them to talk was a better idea than turning America into a juggernaut dominated by "damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead" political strategy.

It would be wise to remember this when talking about policy that will either fix the problem or turn us into a nation with even less money in our wallets to harden the longer wait for a doctor.

New Year, Some New & Old

Greetings 2008; can't wait to see what kind of shenanigans we can look forward to this year but no matter what happens I don't think the local political scene can hold a candle to 2007's tight election race for Mayor Plusquellic, the rise of Russ Pry or Marco Summerville's travel travail.

Some new:

• Thorn-in-the-side of City Hall Warner Mendenhall has a new blog about public records; The People's Records provides a nice rundown of FOI issue and also spiffs this blog; thanks for the blogroll, Warner;
• Kevin Coughlin weighs in with some new rules for his New Summit Republicans (link downloads the .pdf file); it's a good rundown on what the "new" GOP has in mind for life after Alex if they're successful in dethroning Arshinkoff from the Summit County chair, led by getting a handle on the $600,000 critics say is spent to keep the party offices going;
• Bruce Kilby is heading to court whether he likes it or not over the property he owns in the Dead Poets neighborhood. This AkronNewsNow story includes our interview with Kilby as he finds himself on a side of the law the law-makers rarely see; it isn't often a sitting councilman is being sued by his own city in an Eminent Domain taking but observers could see it coming when talks started breaking down and Kilby maintains he's getting low-balled because he's a vocal critic of the Administration.

As for the old, I'm still working to prove my existence to the third-party provider of my company's FSA health savings account. As noted earlier under the heading of "Why I Hate Insurance Companies" my simple attempt to access my money being held for my health spending was denied when the company reported I didn't exist -- despite holding their card, which I had used earlier this year, in my hand and complete with account number. No response yet from supervisors who promised to call (I'm not holding my breath) so I went ahead and paid for the stuff anyway. Now starts the battle of documenting my existence; included will be the letter I got from said third-party manager noting my balance on December 5, 2007 for the account that doesn't exist.

My friend Chuck Collins noted I called this experience "Why I Hate Health Insurance Companies" on our AkronNewsNow blog. I apologize to other insurance companies at this time but reserve judgment until I need to get some of my promised money back from them, too.

2007: Why I Hate Insurance Companies

This could be entitled "no good deed goes unpunished" after a very frustrating experience at the end of the year trying to use the HSA (health savings account) money I've salted away throughout the year for a new pair of glasses, right? Simple -- except they say I don't exist.

We started 2007 with these new debit cards from our company through a third-party provider (name withheld at this time). Good idea, giving people better access to their pre-tax health savings account to pay for stuff like out-of-pocket prescription, doctor visits, etc. and it even worked a couple times earlier this year.

But at the end of this year -- today, to be precise -- no go when using the plastic "convenience" card. I know I've got a couple hundred bucks left in the kitty so I called the number on the back of the card and after waiting for 9 minutes and 41 seconds (according to the telephone ticker at the Sears Optical in Twinsburg) I got a live person. All I wanted to know was my balance but the clerk checked my social security number four times, my name (first and last) three times and the card number itself twice before she told me I didn't exist.

"How can this be?", I asked, noting the number I used to call her came from the card she says doesn't exist. She even looked up my company (Rubber City Radio -- that only took another 3 minutes and 32 seconds) and says I didn't exist there, either.

I noted that was pretty strange since they've been taking money out of my paycheck twice a month and they didn't say anything about my not existing at the time. They didn't say anything about my not existing when I used the card in the first quarter of 2007 (that's when I thought it was convenient) but now when I want to cash out not only is the transaction denied but my very existence is denied, too.

This may come as welcome news to my staff.

Now I'm particularly paranoid when it comes to insurance companies and their minions, especially the third-party companies who manage all these programs for our benefit. I imagine the poor clerks answering the phones from pissed-off people such as myself at the end of the year dealing with slow computer uploads and missing records while the executives, who loaded up on six-figure bonuses for their golfing holidays in Hilton Head, celebrate at the end of the year. Personally, I believe America's health care system is crafted to do exactly what it's doing: frustrate and confuse the hell of out the rest of us so we just give up and leave our money with the insurance companies. I'm betting that's part of what leads to those juicy bonuses at the end of the year, as well as the generous lobbying fees to lawyers on Capitol Hill to keep the system as complex and byzantine as possible.

Not that I'm in a position to argue; I asked when a supervisor would be able to find the time to call me back but I'm not holding out my hope. After all, how much hope can one have when they don't exist?