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Donald's Blog
May 14, 2015 In the furtherance of getting my eyes examined We looked up Kaiser Permanente's website to find out if any eye doctors in Colorado Springs accept their insurance. The only thing I could find was a Dr. Shreck at a Kaiser Permanente building, so I called an 800 number and talked to a computer for a few minutes. When the computer wanted me to go find my wallet and get out my Kaiser Permanente card, I laughed and hung up. I found what appeared to be a local number for appointments, but a recorded voice wanted me to leave a message, which I did; nobody ever called back, but we had some errands to run anyway, so meanwhile we drove to the building, at the other end of town, 15 or 20 miles away. There is a great long list of doctors' names on display in the lobby, but none of those doctors are theirs; although Kaiser Permanente's name is on the building, they only lease part of it. When we found Kaiser, they was nobody there. We wandered through the empty offices until we found Administration, where a very nice woman was having lunch at her desk, and asked if she could help us. Sure enough, everybody was out to lunch; she told us that she was sure we would like Dr Shreck, and that he and his assistant would be back soon. I asked her if she got paid extra for taking care of business while everybody else was at lunch; she laughed and said no, and in fact she was responsible for two other locations as well, including Pueblo, which is 40 or 50 miles away. We went away and had a sandwich, and came back to make appointments. Ethne needs to have a checkup too because she had cataract surgery a year ago, and Dr Shreck can do that. Everyone we eventually met was very nice. Everything is different in the West, and everything is different when you get old, but I suspect everything will be just fine when we learn to jump through all the hoops. There was a final surreal touch. The next day I got a telephone call from a computer wanting me to take a survey about my customer satisfaction. The first question was, did I remember talking to a Kaiser Permanente representative on the phone? I said no. The next question was, did I want to call back when I remembered...? I laughed and hung up before the machine could say "Your call is important to us..." UPDATE: it is now June 15th, and it has been at least eight months since I started trying to get new glasses in Colorado Springs. Kaiser Permanente's lab broke my favorite frames, which I cannot replace because they've been discontinued. The glasses I am wearing now are the prescription before last, about ten years old. I'm discovering I that can drive without any glasses at all. May 14, 2015 More on regulations There was a column in the Wall Street Journal this week about how tough graduates are going to have it in 2015, which was mostly an excuse to bash the usual suspects, such as the teachers' union. But one paragraph caught my eye:
Presumably you have to have a license to be an emergency medical technician, while you can probably help Grandma choose a color for her living room walls without a license, but then you will not be a licensed interior designer. But the basic point holds: the number of vocations requiring or offering certificates or licenses has skyrocketed in the last 50 years, and why should an interior designer be licensed at all? And that reminded me of the front page of last weekend's Review section. It galls me to have to agree with Charles Murray about anything; he was the co-author of a nasty book called The Bell Curve in 1996, which purported to show that Jews and Asians have higher IQs than I do, and that African-Americans are not as smart as I am. The bell curve was a sort of graph of IQ tests with minuscule differences in it, easily explained by the fact that the families of Asian kids demand that they do well in school, while black kids are far more subject to peer pressure and don't want to "act white", and all of course without admitting that the "Intelligence Quotient" might not be best measured by a micrometer. [My poor brother loved the bell curve nonsense. I wrote to him that I would give ten points off my IQ to be able to play the piano like Fats Waller, but he didn't get it, and wrote back telling me what Fats Waller would be doing if he were alive today, racist nonsense which I can't repeat in a family blog, and which anyway was comparing yesterday to today, nothing about anybody's IQ. But my brother was an increasingly unhappy man, a fact which I cannot blame on Charles Murray.] But Murray's piece in last weekend's WSJ was an excerpt from his latest book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission:
In 2013, the Code of Federal Regulations was over 175,000 pages. A huge number of these regulations, maybe a majority, are "stupid, pointless or tyrannical", often preventing people from doing their jobs according to their own judgement. The vast majority are not spelled out in legislation; regulatory agencies are allowed by Congress to make them up, and when you run afoul of these regs, the said agencies are the judges and the juries, and there is no appeal. Many of them "could be written only by bureaucrats with too much time on their hands, such as ones that mandate a certain sort of latch for a bakery's flour bins, or the proper way to describe flower bulbs to customers". I am reminded of something I read in England many years ago. Suppose your wife makes really good jam, and everybody raves about it at the church bazaar, so you decide to market it to grocery stores and on the Internet. It would take a team of lawyers weeks to tell you what is required in the printing of the label that goes on the jar, just for a start. This is because England is a country that dates its laws, its unwritten constitution, back to 1066, almost a thousand years, and there are laws on the books that have never been repealed and which are forgotten and not obeyed because they are irrelevant. And sure enough, Murray's solution to the problem of over-zealous regulations is civil disobedience. Ignore them.
In other words, points out Murray, the regulatory agencies are like the Wizard of Oz, the voice booming when it is directed at you or me, but when the curtain is swept aside, revealed as impotent. There's more: he proposes insurance against the regulatory agencies ("People don't build tornado-proof houses; they buy house insurance") and a legal foundation, and occupational defense funds. Governments, local, state and federal, are going to make libertarians of us all.
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