Healthcare Shopping Lunacy

After my disastrous bait-and-switch experience at healthcare.gov, I finally (after more than four months and several hours of on-the-phone troubleshooting) get confirmation the plan that didn't include my kids' pediatrician (despite the pre-enrollment search that listed all the docs I cared about) was cancelled.  Then L's coverage terminates, and we are in the market again.  My existing insurer can't add L to my plan because its employees can't figure out who to transfer me to in order to get a quote, until they finally transfer me to someone whose incompetence (I shudder to think his abuse is intentional, but it certainly could be) prevents him from obtaining from me the information needed to provide me a quote.  He interrupts me over and over; I hang up and try back for someone else in his department, but he answers again and is no more helpful the next time, either.  So, bye-bye Aetna.  This is how you lose healthy insureds.  That's why I'm on a private exchange looking for health coverage.  The private exchange is pleasant in that I could get a human to walk me though it and answer questions and email me documents about the various coverages available.  It looks pretty good.

I enter detailed information about everyone I want covered in order to get plan cost information, and when I click to "apply" for the plan … I'm required to enter it all over again. 

I do. 

Then, I get a page that informs me I haven't applied until I've made a medical application. 

Guess what?  I get to re-enter all the information, yet again.

I click to add a spouse, and the webform demands I answer whether this spouse is married.  I mean, really.

Then I get this:

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires us to be reasonably assured that you and each member on this policy have coverage for pediatric dental services that are essential health benefits. The Affordable Care Act requires these benefits even if there is no one on the policy who is eligible for these services.

The government's own web site makes crystal clear that this is a lie: there's no obligation to purchase dental coverage, only an obligation to make it available – and no tax imposed on persons without dental coverage.  After doing some math based on expected dental costs, I conclude I'm better off putting premium dollars in a health savings account.  But the "medical application" requires one to claim to have dental coverage, or purchase it for over $40/month/person.  Just crazy.  The law doesn't require the coverage, but the idiots who coded the site do.

This just goes on and on.

Beam me up, Scotty.  There's little sign of intelligent life in the insurance industry.

Google Can't Be Trusted With Your Personal Information, Either

Now, we learn that Google can't be trusted with your private information, either. When you buy through Google Play, vendors get personal information with which to target you with attention you had no desire to invite. This is interesting in light of Google's prior explanation that of course it won't disappoint users with its privacy practices, or they'd refuse to use Google.

This seems to continue a negative trend.  Recently I wrote about Google apparently misusing my credit card info, then offering no way at all to ascertain why it was making charges to my credit card. Unable to get relief from Google, I had to tell my credit card company to deny all transactions from Google in the future.

So much for Don't Be Evil.

Google Not Trustworthy With Your Credit Card

I have a domain name I use for professional work to receive email. In order to get reliable email (in light of Apple's abysmal track record with MobileMe and Mac.com email) I pay Google once a year for a professional-grade email service. Benefits include huge-attachment-handling.

I don't use Google to advertise; I don't advertise my day-job online at all. The couple of places I've appeared in professional listings online have, in fact, resulted in nothing at all but wasted time due to low-quality leads from "prospects" who don't understand what I do and have no desire to pay me to do it. So imagine my surprise when I saw Google Inc. on a credit card statement, charging me for AdWords service.

Say what?

Naturally, Google doesn't supply any contact information through which to find out what on Earth was supposedly done for the $4.16 billed me, and how to stop it. And since Google has enrolled in some kind of signature-less service that prevents my credit card from being able to provide itemization, my credit card company's online interface said I needed to contact the merchant directly about the charge.

Um. Google is as opaque as can be. How am I supposed to contact Google about charges, when Google's phone number says "Because Google does not offer live customer support at this time, please visit our web site at www.Google.com/support"...? Google.com has no apparent interface for people who want to know why Google is charging them money. Worse, I can't see a way to limit Google to charging my only for the one service for which I'm actually willing to pay.

Pretending interest as a new customer to get a human resulted in transfers to automated call queues which disclaimed the power to help.

At the end of one of my longer calls to Google (ie, transfers followed by new combinations of numerical responses designed to avoid the areas of the menu tree known to refer me to Google.com), I was asked whether I wanted to take a survey in English. Sure, why not. After spending several minutes giving answers (by pushing numbers) and leaving a recorded message ... I was kicked back to the menu position in which I was asked whether I wanted to take a survey in English.

Google's idea of a customer-friendly interface probably says something about why Apple is making all the money in interfaces.

Solution: I told my credit card to block Google as a merchant. I have about eight months to replace Google for my email service. Any suggestions?

Why DRM Is A Bad Deal

Amazon illustrates why buying entertainment data crippled by DRM is inappropriate for anyone expecting more than a temporary rental.  Google made a similar illustration when it closed a DRM video business in 2007, which involved killing the back-end systems that make it possible for users to read the DRM content.  The only upside was that Google refunded its victims customers.  Given the likelihood of customers getting financially-worthwhile relief from a DRM vendor under the arbitration provisions governing the clickwrap agreements facing most of the buyers of DRM on the planet, there's little reason to believe future DRM vendors will issue refunds when they close – or reason to suspect they will be solvent when they do.

Google Safe From Cuil

According to studious Brits, the new search engine Cuil.com (named after the mythical Finn MacCuil who, following a salmon cooking accident, had the ability to gain wisdom by sucking his thumb) hasn't got all its kinks ironed out. One review went so far as to suggest it wasn't ever intended to work as advertised, but merely to showcase some search tech components for some hypothetical buyer of crawling and indexing technology.

Entertainingly, I can't find this blog or any evidence of it on Cuil. I can usually use Google to search for posts I would like to link to. And it was sloooow.

As suggested by Daring Fireball, you can follow news about Cuil using Google News.

So, Google is safe. For now ....

AT&T Does Not Really Want Your Business

As it turns out, moving one's phone service isn't the snap I imagined.

When I called AT&T to move my local phone number about a block and a half, and to see whether AT&T wanted to sell me broadband or other services, I was unable to get a human.

I tried AT&T's web site -- oddly located at http://www.att.com/easymoney (someone at the firm has an ironic sense of humor; read on!) -- and went through a very laborious process of discovering that all the service bundles involved a crippled DSL service with not-very-broadband limit caps. To get faster service, you need to pay more, but those rates weren't available in bundles.

After about thirty minutes of fishing -- including getting numbers off paper bills and signing up for an online account management feature that didn't exist when I started service at this address -- I spotted a link for folks who are moving.

Aha!

I clicked it and started putting services into my checkout cart. This also took a while, because picking a DSL service also involves several laboriously-slowly-served pages of options for whether you want to install the modem yourself or want a $200 tech visit, or whether you want a modem or a modem-plus-wireless-gateway device, either of which costs money and both of which come with a mail-in coupon for the pre-sales-tax price of the device. They don't put all these options on one page, which would be a snap; they serve these options to you piecemeal, with every page taking about a minute to be served to your existing cable broadband connection, through which every other site on the Internet roars through like greased lightning.

Finally, I get it all set up. I look around for some place to ... you know ... tell AT&T where I'm moving. I don't see it so I figure I should click for checkout, and that the address will be part of the checkout option. After yet another glacial age, I see a page telling me the function I attempted was down due to maintenance, apparently the exact same 'maintenance' that was up last week when I got the same error. The text in the maintenance message invites me, if I want to order a product or service, to call a toll-free number:



For the record, I know this dude. He normally wears his hair trimmed close to the skull, and keeps every hair perfectly organized with military precision in an orderly grain pattern. The wild corona of hair depicted in this ad existed only after they let him stand for a month in the sun waiting for a human on AT&T's toll-free number. He's only smiling because he's begun to hallucinate, and thinks the shimmering oasis near the horizon is surrounded by dancing girls. He is presently recuperating in a sanatorium, which I can't identify due to federal health privacy guidelines.

I roll my eyes. I called the toll-free number over a week ago trying to set up service, and couldn't get a human despite heroic efforts to find some department willing to sell me services if I pleaded. But I dial the number.

A recorded voice asks me what I want, and suggests I say things like "pay a bill."

Angrily, I say: "Moving."

The voice asks me if I'm moving and want to move current service to a new address.

I'm shocked. "Yes," I barely stammer.

I hear sounds I normally associate with transferred calls, and hear another recording explaining how that while AT&T is open 24-hours, that office isn't able to take my call. The recording does not suggest at any time when a human might deign to take my money.

I have a referral code, CH1020133, by which I can purportedly track whether users actually achieve service orders through AT&T's site. I offer a donut to the first person who succeeds. Or a coffee. Your pick; I'll ship at my expense. (UPDATE: to compete for the coffee or donut, you may have to use the site http://www.att.com/referrals to enter the referral code, though I see referral code boxes in the checkout window displayed before users are informed the online service registration is a big time sink that doesn't lead to service activation or orders or address changes at all. Take your pick. I will wait to see whether AT&T tells me I have a referral, but I won't be holding my breath -- their service is the pits!)

I don't think AT&T is actually taking new customers at all this month, unless maybe for cellular service activated with in-person human involvement.

When I used to get calls asking whether I wanted AT&T to provide me with some service or another, I used to lambast the callers with unhappy recollections of what AT&T charged to rent me phones when AT&T held a lawful monopoly on telephone service in the United States. I remembered for years, though it's slipped my mind now whether it was $19.95 a phone a month, or $25 a phone a month, for folks who wanted multiple-line phones with rollover. If you had a modem, though, and used it much, you really needed two lines.

Remember 300 baud dial-in to your favorite local BBS? Compuserve?

Heh. This stuff is so much cheaper now. If AT&T weren't promising to bundle unlimited long-distance calling with local service, they'd never have a prayer of selling me any service of any kind ever again.

If I can't move the service within a week, I'll find a different local provider and post the information here. For long distance, I've been using ECG's long-distance service and honestly, they're a dream.

Get this: when you call, you can get a human. You rarely do this, because the phone bill is not only cheap, it's consistently accurate. Unless you are curious about weird things like international rate plan options to specific countries, you can happily never call ECG at all.

Given how little ECG charges, maybe I don't need to pay anyone for unlimited long-distance service.

Hmm . . . .


UPDATE: ECG does not need to be called over international rates any longer, as they're available online. Email billing can get you 2.5¢/min rates. I've had these guys for years and love them -- chiefly because I never notice they are there because the service always works. Look carefully and notice none of my links to ECG have any kind of referral/kickback data embedded in them. This is a real endorsement.

Hot To Short Apple

I'm not sure of these articles are just link-trolling -- after all, announcing Apple as a short is kind of famous for attracting vitriol -- but to see a couple of them back-to-back is interesting.

A writer at Seeking Alpo, claiming to be an investor and not a speculator, nevertheless says he's shorting big into Apple's earnings release. The author doesn't explain why his thesis about margins or investor sentiment should be considered more than idle speculation, unfortunately, so the take-home message (Apple is volatile due to emotions, and thus will crash hard when margins lead to earnings disappointment) is somewhat challenging to accept.

On the other hand, a poster I've not previously seen appeared at Investor's Hub to tout AAPL as a short premise, based exclusively on charts. To his thinking, the charts portend a bearish future leading into the forties. He doesn't seem to be thinking about the hundred and forties, mind you, or a stock split. He's apparently thinking Apple will drop to a quarter of its price, after looking at lines he drew on charts.

I on the other hand have no idea what will happen to Apple's stock price. I do note that Apple's Mac sales are climbing at over thirty percent a year (comparing quarters with year-ago quarters), and Apple's efforts to increase iTunes sales have resulted in the online music store eclipsing Wal-Mart as the leading U.S. vendor of recorded music by volume (hey, a pun!), while it succeeds in displacing a slew of entrenched rivals to offer the most desired phone.

Folks can kvetch if they like about iPod cannibalization by iPhones, but let's be serious: how can you be upset about upselling a customer to a device that also offers software and service revenue shares? (and is more expensive, and has higher margin, and has the same chance of selling music, but perhaps better because it can sell music while you're walking around away from your computer...?) Every iPod turned into an iPhone sale is a victory for Apple.

If Apple's margins fall because low-margin products like music for resale have exploded, but it adds to Apple's bottom line slightly, it's not a net loss but a gain in profit. The only loss Apple would experience is if in Apple's established, profitable businesses there is a deterioration in margins. Apple's apparent pricing power in the component market suggests that Apple is getting as good a price as anyone for components, and the iPhone teardown estimates suggest the new phone has even better margins than the old one.

The iPod isn't the future. It's passed from star to cash cow. Apple will milk the iPod for all it's worth, and it may remain a good business for some time to come (how long did the Walkman sell?), but it's not the place Apple will be seeing the explosive growth for which people want to love tech stocks. If Apple's advances of its development environment into handhelds and into enterprises is any indication, Apple sees the future in the Mac platform. I had a fantasy ten years ago that rack-mounted Unix servers would propel Apple into enterprise, and now it seems the rack-mounted servers will be slipping into enterprises on the coattails of Unix smartphones.

Funny, that.

I am perfectly willing to accept that prices may be irrational from time to time, but I think that Apple's demonstrated growth and the sales momentum it's built for future development portend good bottom-line results. Eventually, the thinking goes, prices rationalize.

Who knows?

I for one will remain long Apple. Heck, for now I intend to remain short Apple puts.

Cops Troll Craigslist for Flesh

It's unsurprising that police are screening Craigslist for minors selling their bodies. Prostitutes, after all, admit using Craigslist to sell sex.

What I'm less clear on is whether there are some demographic features the police might be identifying, suggesting why folks in jurisdictions where sex trade is illegal would engage in it. Here, I suppose, my background in policy analysis shows its colors. As with efforts to curb illicit drugs, one sees two main trends: enforcement and education. The enforcement angle isn't interested in why, it's interested in who and where and in obtaining convictions. The education angle may or may not have overlap with enforcement. For example, some needle-exchange programs -- a classic example of harm-reduction theory in practice -- have been threatened with enforcement activity as enabling abuse, despite being intended to mitigate disease risk to the broader population and not merely as a benefit to addicts. On the other hand, where the problematic activity isn't illegal, some activists argue it's easier to find and educate the at-risk population into mainstream behavior -- for example, because fear of enforcement might discourage efforts to access harm-reduction programs. So my interest in data, being driven by an interest in understanding the mechanism(s) and issue(s) involved and thus in developing responses, may be of utter inconsequence to those in the best position to collect the information.

And why would one engage in an illegal sex business? Presumably a person could open business in Nevada or Amsterdam, after all, and enjoy both freedom from prosecution and the benefits of a lawfully regulated trade (e.g., legally-enforceable contracts). Whether it makes the business any more glamorous or satisfying is doubtful, but knowing you can call the police if things go amiss -- and get help rather than a lecture and a set of cuffs[1] -- should be worth something.

I suspect -- though I haven't done a study on it -- that no small fraction of those in the sex industry were drawn for reasons that turn on powerlessness. The link above quotes a 14yo who 'worked' Craigslist since the age of 11 saying "I wanted to feel loved. ... I wanted to feel important." An adult open about her sex-industry modeling career explains that she entered it because illness made her unsuitable for ordinary work. It's not worth overlooking that esteem and powerlessness are issues that affect models and performers outside the sex industry. How many teen girls training for careers in dance are encouraged toward undernourishment and smoking by people (teachers, peers, opinion leaders) who make them hate their appearance or doubt themselves?

Of course, I don't want to be misunderstood that poor self-esteem (or simple financial desperation) explains illegal prostitution. There are folks with other explanations for choosing sex careers (I couldn't find the links I had in mind, hmph). I suspect that, beside the slave trade (apparently alive and well in the US, not just port cities, and not just for sex workers), desperate people perceiving no personal alternatives likely comprise a principal portion of the industry most likely to result in the kinds of unhealthy conduct that makes folks who oppose legalization continue to do so. On the other hand, if the reason to outlaw commercial sex is to protect victims rather than dispense punishment upon a class of unworthies, perhaps some effort to design and implement a harm-reduction-model intervention is worthwhile. (While I understand the argument that it's a victimless crime, this isn't the argument advanced by those supporting prosecutions.)

In the US, this is about as politically plausible for the sex industry as for the drug trade.

[1] OK, some folks are into cuffs. And the authors of Lady Cop (lyrics) definitely understood this. However, I'm thinking the reason cuffs are considered kink is that it's not mainstream. (Yet!)

Knowing The Path Isn't Walking The Path

In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that there is a difference between knowing the path, and walking it. This is true. There are examples all the time of folks who have some realization about the real path to what they want or need, but still don't manage to pursue it.

This post is about Bill Gates' recognition that Microsoft isn't on The Path and the dates in question make clear that Gates' recognition and Microsoft's warning from its founder weren't enough to get Microsoft on The Path.

For those of you too tired to read, or who simply prefer radio, I offer KIRO-AM/710's Dave Ross conducting a dramatic performance of excerpts of Bill Gates' 2003 email about trying to purchase downloadable software created by Microsoft. In it, he details the challenges faced by a user trying to buy and download Microsoft MovieMaker and the Digital Plus pack. He resorts to frustrated allcaps in places as he tries to express his exasperation about what he experienced trying to use a web site (Microsoft.com) whose creators never imagined folks would try to buy downloads from Microsoft's "Downloads" page, and the like.

By 2003 I wasn't much of a user of Microsoft's products, but I'll take Bill's word on this one. I gather that XBox has made it easier for folks to buy at least some downloads, but then, XBox has cost Microsoft so much more money than it's brought in, that last year MSFT had to engineer its finances to make the last quarter of calendar 2007 seem to produce an XBox profit. (MSFT accelerated into mid-2007 -- the prior fiscal year -- billions in above-expected warranty-related expenses rather than continue to recognize them as they were incurred, so that the last quarter of 2007 -- while still servicing warranty issues -- didn't have any of those charges booked on the current quarter.) Meanwhile, fierce competition has forced Microsoft to price XBox competitively, in the expectation that its per-unit loss can be overcome with eventual software and services sales. The improved interface and shopping experience MSFT crafts in its entertainment division will hopefully bear fruit elsewhere at the company as it fights heinous user experiences.

The other Bill Gates email from 2003 that attracts attention relates more directly to Microsoft's entertainment division.

When Apple first launched the iPod in 2001, it was a Firewire device without any support for Microsoft's customers. Third parties such as MediaFour offered solutions like XPlay to enable users owning Firewire-equipped hardware running Microsoft operating systems to encode and synch music to Apple's ultra-portable (by then-existing standards) music player. Apple didn't lift a finger to support non-Mac buyers for about half a year, until it was dragged into it kicking and screaming by folks who were insisting they wanted to be customers and would pay a third party for the privilege if they had to. Say what you will about Apple's salesmanship, those folks can take a while to pick up a hint.

What's Microsoft care? It doesn't. Microsoft licenses digital rights management (DRM) technology to several firms offering download services, and everybody understands that once critical mass lines up behind Microsoft's format -- and with Microsoft's development and marketing resources to keep its format's performance and availability ahead of competitors, why shouldn't it? -- Apple's customers will either be locked out of the music market (DRM is coming to a new music disc near you! Old music will die!) or Apple will have to license Microsoft's DRM to enable its customers to continue playing it. Sell all the tape players you want, Stevie-baby -- it's the tapes that make the thing sing.

Then, in 2003, Apple launched the Apple Music Store. Well, they pretty quickly renamed it the iTunes Music Store when they were reminded about their agreement with the Beatles' music label Apple Corps that Apple Computer had to keep the Apple name good and clear of the music business ... but it was the Apple Music Store at first. The Apple Music Store was accessible through iTunes (which before being renamed had previously been known as SoundJam from Cassady & Greene), formerly a computer jukebox like anyone else's: you encoded your music and you organized playlists and you listened and maybe you synched music to a portable player.

Now you also could buy music.

Not just rent it, which was the going game on Microsoft's DRM platform. Apple had struck a deal -- probably because the licensors saw immediately that Apple's program only ran on Apple's computers and everyone knew how few of those were ever sold -- that allowed folks to buy by the song in addition to buying albums. Apple launched sales-capable iTunes for Macs on April 28, 2003. And Apple customers bought millions of tracks.

But before Apple customers had made it clear they liked the music store, Bill Gates wrote April 30 -- within two days of the launch -- that Jobs had caught Microsoft flat-footed, and needed to be replied with a good Microsoft music solution. In particular, he cited: (1) Jobs' ability to focus on a few things that counted, have folks do the interface right, and market the whole as if it were revolutionary; (2) "a better licensing deal than anyone else has gotten for music" (which he said "is very strange to me. The music companies [already compete with their own stores and yet] Somehow they decide to give Apple the ability to do something pretty good"; therefore (3) "Now that Jobs has done it we need to move fast to get something where the UI and Rights are as good."

Fast forward five years. Microsoft's given up, in essence, on its partners ever getting music sales straight -- and has launched both its own player and its own store. The store won't sell you one track. The store will sell you a bundle of points, usable also for XBox 360 services, which you may not yet know you need, and the points are sold in bundles that aren't divisible by 79, the number of points needed to buy a song (79 points turns out to be 98.75¢). One-click? Change from that point bundle?

Sure, big point bundles protect Microsoft from per-transaction charges that can eat all the profit on a one-song transaction. It doesn't do much to make buying songs a simple joy or an impulse buy, though. It seems to make of song buying the kind of user-hostile maze Gates railed against when he tried to install MovieMaker.

Now that Microsoft's had five years to benefit from Gates' instruction from the helm, one might think Microsoft should have overrun the field. The Microsoft we feared in the mid-'90s would have done it for sure, right? What's changed? And why can't a company with so many really smart engineers (and they are smart, I've met some both before and after they were recruited to Redmond) organize solutions to problems like this?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the increasing size of both Microsoft and Apple is going to make nimble reaction to competitors a bit more challenging. In a few fields, I expect Apple to keep the focus needed to produce high-quality products (developing the operating system and development environment for quality performance on iPhones and near-term-visible hardware, for example), though I believe I already see Apple at the limits of its expertise in other areas (Apple received criticism for its dealings with indie music labels and small bands, and I expect it will have the same problems an order of magnitude worse when it starts selling iPod software through its AppStore.

With iTunes and the AppStore, Apple has a possibility of offering content owners worldwide access to customers, and with that power Apple stands in a position to materially change the relationship between bands and the public (and their crooked managers and labels), between developers and the public (like, the public might find them), and so on. Recognizing Cocoa's strength in localization, a single global software marketplace is an extremely valuable prospective asset -- and a likely asset, if Apple doesn't screw the pooch.

Let's hope Apple doesn't learn the wrong lesson from its old operating systems competitor.