We have a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) through Dan’s office. This is a Good Thing. We put aside some pre-tax money every pay period, which can be used to reimburse us for certain out-of-pocket medical expenses. Thus, we are not taxed on those expenses, meaning that the government partially subsidizes them. If we put aside too much money (a possibility, since we have to estimate the amount the year before), we lose the excess, which presumably helps the government offset its subsidy. We therefore try to be conservative in estimating how much money to put aside.

So…this year because we had some unusual expenses, we ran out of our FSA budget sometime in June. With $14.74 left in the FSA account for the year, Dan had to make a doctor’s copay of $15.00. He tried to put this on the debit card associated with the FSA account, and (naturally) they would take only $14.74. So he charged that amount and paid $0.26 in cash. Perfectly reasonable, yes?

In August, we received a notice from the company that administers the FSA account that there was a charge of $14.74 for which they required backup documentation. Normally our copays do not require backup documentation, so…apparently either Dan hadn’t gotten, or I hadn’t saved, the medical documentation for the charge, not expecting to need it.

Apparently, the reason the system rejected the charge of $14.74 was that it was an odd amount, not matching our standard copay, and it’s theoretically possible we might have bought something from the doctor that didn’t qualify for the FSA account. In other words, the rejection was triggered because we had underpaid by twenty-six cents.

In order to clear up this $0.26 discrepancy, I decided that the easiest thing to do would be to submit some other charge that was clearly legitimate and more than the $14.74 under dispute. I got on the benefit administration company’s Web site in early November to do this. (Yes, I procrastinate bureaucratic stuff like this.) But their system wouldn’t allow me to enter new charges because it looked at all charges submitted rather than all charges accepted. Since the $14.74 under dispute had been submitted (though not accepted), the system thought that we were already maxxed out for the year.

So I called the customer support line. After almost three minutes negotiating their phone system, I spoke with a Real Person, who told me that I had to submit the new charge manually (not through their Web site) and that she would annotate our account so that they would apply the new charge against the outstanding $14.74 and call it even. I also annotated the claim form in large letters with this information.

I submitted the information manually via US mail.

Yesterday, we received a letter denying the claim. The reason the claim was denied was that it was for $25.00 but there was only $14.74 left in the account.

Today I got on the phone, negotiated the phone system for almost three minutes, and spoke with a Real Person. She told me that, even though our account had been annotated by the previous Real Person I talked with, the system had rejected the new charge because the $14.74 claim was still open. She said she is going to resubmit the charge for manual review and it should go through just fine.

If for some reason it doesn’t, we’ll be getting another letter from their system.

As nearly as I can tell, the fact that we paid $0.26 too little has now cost me $0.44 for a stamp and about an hour of my time. It has cost the administration company $0.88 for postage and two phone calls with Real People lasting 5-10 minutes each. A company I once consulted to estimated that every call to Customer Support costs the company close to $50 in salary, indirect expenses, office space, etc. That was ten years ago, but let’s say this company is really efficient, and each call costs them only $25. Therefore, they have spent some $50 so far in order to handle Dan’s underpayment of twenty-six cents. And they will spend more than that: we still have a manual review process to look forward to.

I’m sure this is just the smallest example of the sad state of affairs of our health-care system. Was anyone wondering why our health care costs are so high?

Please forgive any blurriness–it’s pretty amazing how good the pictures come out even with a little Canon point-and-shoot camera and no tripod!

“Well, I’m not surprised,” I say. “The lobster in the ocean used to be so plentiful that they washed up onto the beaches. They fed lobster to the prisoners in the jails so frequently that the prisoners sent a petition to King George begging him to make them stop.”

“Let’s face it,” says Dan. “The planet isn’t what it used to be.”

No, it isn’t. “It’s going downhill fast,” I say, letting my pessimism get the better of me. “Time to move on. Time to get that colony ship ready to voyage out to the next planet.”

“I’ll be the first to volunteer,” says my science-fiction-averse husband.

Whoa.

Wasn’t there an article recently in The Boston Globe Magazine in which the author opines that “The baby boomers are the first generation that will… actually live too long. By refusing to expire after a reasonable number of years, the boomers are threatening the social order”? In arguing that the average lifespan of generations ago was in the forties meant that people in their forties were old, the author has succumbed to a common misunderstanding. She has overlooked the fact that over a third of the population died in infancy, in childhood, and in childbirth. And in war. It was not unusual for those that survived these catastrophes to live into their seventies or eighties or longer. But the author puts forth an argument that may be only too popular among the younger generations: The old folks have been around too long. Time to find a graceful, civilized way to get rid of them.

Well, young lady, this is your chance. We can solve the problem of the Earth on her last gasp and the overpopulation of healthy boomers growing older in one single, visionary stroke: Just pack us up in a space ship and send us off.

Hey, maybe a lot of us will go.

We baby boomers get a virgin planet where lobsters wash up on the beaches, and you get to deal with this dying Earth. Do you think you might actually do something about it before the human cancer kills the whole planet? Somehow, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s already too late.

And worse: Wouldn’t it be just like us to ruin the next planet, too?

Oppenheimer downgrades Apple to perform [from "outperform", a stock rating]

Microsoft plans quick fix for IE [please be sure to download and install the patch to keep your passwords and other personal data safe]

Yahoo to scrub personal data after three months [glad to know that...]

and, oh yes…

Scientists say universe is expanding

Okay, let’s assume that we all guessed correctly that #4 is the one not like the others. The timescale of this item far outlasts the timescale of the other three. And let’s look more in depth at this breaking news.

Haven’t we in fact known that the universe is expanding for, well, years now, if not decades? But the big news here is that we now have added evidence that the expansion is accelerating. And you know what that means… Sometime in the future we will not be able to see any other galaxies but our own, even with the most powerful telescope because they will all be past the event horizon — farther away than the speed of light can carry their image to us. And we will be isolated in a lonely universe.

The implication of this discovery is that we (well, at least some of us) now believe that so-called empty space is not really empty at all; rather, it’s full of energy. And this energy also prevents the further “clumping” of stars into galaxies and galaxies into larger and larger galaxies, which our current mathematical modeling of the universe would predict but which we do not observe.

On a personal-interest sidenote, Einstein has also been vindicated. When he developed the General Theory of Relativity, people (including him) believed that the universe was static (not expanding). According to Einstein’s original theory, the measured effects of gravity should have been stronger than they actually were. And so Einstein introduced a kind of fudge factor into his equations known as the “cosmological constant”, set to -1. The purpose of the cosmological constant was to reconcile the mathematics of the general theory with observed phenomena. But with an expanding universe, the cosmological fudge factor–er, constant–was no longer needed. At one point, Einstein called the introduction of the cosmological constant his greatest error. But it turned out that the measured expansion of the universe did not sufficiently account for the discrepancy, and this set scientists looking for dark matter, and later for dark energy. And now, this measurement of distant galaxy-clusters reported in the news today may finally account for the discrepancy and explain the need for the cosmological constant by proving the existence of dark energy in otherwise empty space.

And where does all this leave string theory, the ten-dimensional universe, parallel universes, and other approaches not yet  considered mainstream physics? They are not disproved. Quantum field theory predicts that the energy of a vacuum should be 120 orders of magnitude (yes, ten to the 120th power) higher than those observed. So we still have a way to go.